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Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

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Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#601

Post by timr »

simonw wrote: post #600
timr wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used Sonnet 4.5 and Codex 5 and 5.1, but not in their native environment [1]. Setting aside the fact that your examples are mostly “replicate this existing thing in language X” [2], again, I’m not saying that the models haven’t gotten better at crapping out code, or that they’re not useful tools. I use them every day. They're great tools, when someone actually intelligent is using them. I also freely concede tha…

I know you said don't engage in "you're holding it wrong"... but have you tried these models running in a coding agent tool loop with automatic approvals turned on? Copilot style autocomplete or chatting with a model directly is an entirely different experience from letting the model spend half an hour writing code, running that code and iterating on the result uninterrupted. Here's an example where I sent a prompt a…

> I know you said don't engage in "you're holding it wrong"... but have you tried these models running in a coding agent tool loop with automatic approvals turned on?

edit: I wrote a different response here, then I realized we might be talking about different things.

Are you asking if I let the agents use tools without my prior approval? I do that for a certain subset of tools (e.g. run tests, do requests, run queries, certain shell commands, even use the browser if possible), but I do not let the agents do branch merges, deploys, etc. I find that the best models are just barely good enough to produce a bad first draft of a multi-file feature (e.g. adding an entirely new controller+view to a web app), and I would never ever consider YOLOing their output to production unless I didn't care at all. I try to get to tests passing clean before even looking at the code.

Also, I am happy to let Copilot burn tokens in this manner and will regularly do it for refactors or initial drafts of new features, I'm honestly not sure if the juice is worth the squeeze -- I still typically have to spend substantial time reworking whatever they create, and the revision time required scales with the amount of time they spend spinning. If I had to pay per token, I'd be much more circumspect about this approach.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#602

Post by timr »

nl wrote: post #597
timr wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used Sonnet 4.5 and Codex 5 and 5.1, but not in their native environment [1]. Setting aside the fact that your examples are mostly “replicate this existing thing in language X” [2], again, I’m not saying that the models haven’t gotten better at crapping out code, or that they’re not useful tools. I use them every day. They're great tools, when someone actually intelligent is using them. I also freely concede tha…

What do you class a "substantial program"? For me it is something I can describe in a single casual prompt. For example I wrote a fully working version of https://tools.nicklothian.com/llm_comparator.html in a single prompt. I refined it and added features with more prompts, but it worked from the start.

Good question. No strict line, and it's always going to be subjective and a little bit silly to categorize, but when I'm debating this argument I'm thinking: a product that does not exist today (obviously many parts of even a novel product will be completely derivative, and that's fine), with multiple views, controllers, and models, and a non-trivial amount of domain-specific business logic. Likely 50k+ lines of code, but obviously that's very hand-wavy and not how I'd differentiate.

Think: SaaS application that solves some domain specific problem in corporate accounting, versus "in-browser speadsheet", or "first-person shooter video game with AI, multi-player support, editable levels, networking and high-resolution 3D graphics" vs "flappy bird clone".

When you're working on a product of this size, you're probably solving problems like the ones cited by simonw multiple times a week, if not daily.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#603

Post by latexr »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #590
latexr wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s nothing incongruent about that pairing (though I also think you’re not being entirely fair in describing what your parent comment said). Atom bombs also fit: They are basically useless and they are so powerful that they can destroy humanity. With LLMs, the destruction is less immediate and overt, but chatbots do provable harm to people, and can be manipulated to warp our sense of reality. https://en.wikipedia…

Atom bombs also fit: They are basically useless Let's ask your friendly local Ukrainian refugee about that. People are having romantic relationships with their chatbots and committing suicide because of them. That is harm. So the only permissible technologies are those suitable for use by children and the mentally disturbed. I see.

> Let's ask your friendly local Ukrainian refugee about that.

You understand “basically useless” does not mean “entirely useless”, right? That’s why the word “basically” is there.

I know Ukrainian people. I know Ukrainian people who are in attacked cities right now. They are friendly, and all of them would understand my point.

> So the only permissible technologies are those suitable for use by children and the mentally disturbed. I see.

That is a bad faith argument. HN rules ask you to not do that and steel man. It is obvious that is not what I said, “permissible” isn’t part of the argument at all. And if you think one needs to be “mentally disturbed” to be affected, you are high on arrogance and low on empathy and information. There are numerous stories of sane people becoming affected.

https://archive.ph/2025.09.24-025805/https://www.nytimes.com...

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#604

Post by iLoveOncall »

johnfn wrote: post #566
iLoveOncall wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> either not generally fluent in programming or stand to benefit financially from reinforcing this meme Then figure out which one of the two you are. Years of experience have never equated competence.

Blindly asserting that everyone who disagrees with you is a shill or incompetent seems unlikely to be conducive to good discourse.

You seem to say that it's not the truth. I disagree.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#605

Post by 3836293648 »

hruhbuikr wrote: post #587
yoyohello13 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally a voice of reason. The tools will just get better and easier to use. I use LLMs now, but I'm not going to dump a bunch of time learning the new hotness. I'll let other people do that and pickup the useful pieces later. Unless your gunning for a top position as a vibe coder, this whole concept of "falling behind" is just pure FOMO.

Yeah Karpathy is engaged here in more hype creation. Software engineers pretending they just smashed some particles together and there is a whole lot of new data to math out. It's high dose copium. Please keep the good times rolling! Buy my books! Sub to my stack! Meanwhile, with local models, local RAG, and shell scripts, I am wandering 3D immersive worlds via a GPU accelerated presentation layer I vibe coded with a…

What on Earth have you used to get reasonable results out of a local model?

I've tried at every new model release (that can run on my 24GB card) and everything is still entirely useless.

I'm not writing web stuff though.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#606

Post by nl »

timr wrote: post #602
nl wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you class a "substantial program"? For me it is something I can describe in a single casual prompt. For example I wrote a fully working version of https://tools.nicklothian.com/llm_comparator.html in a single prompt. I refined it and added features with more prompts, but it worked from the start.

Good question. No strict line, and it's always going to be subjective and a little bit silly to categorize, but when I'm debating this argument I'm thinking: a product that does not exist today (obviously many parts of even a novel product will be completely derivative, and that's fine), with multiple views, controllers, and models, and a non-trivial amount of domain-specific business logic. Likely 50k+ lines of code…

I don't think anyone is claiming they can one-shot a 50k line SAAS app.

I think you'd get close on something like Lovable but that's not really one shot either.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#607

Post by simonw »

timr wrote: post #601
simonw wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you said don't engage in "you're holding it wrong"... but have you tried these models running in a coding agent tool loop with automatic approvals turned on? Copilot style autocomplete or chatting with a model directly is an entirely different experience from letting the model spend half an hour writing code, running that code and iterating on the result uninterrupted. Here's an example where I sent a prompt a…

> I know you said don't engage in "you're holding it wrong"... but have you tried these models running in a coding agent tool loop with automatic approvals turned on? edit : I wrote a different response here, then I realized we might be talking about different things. Are you asking if I let the agents use tools without my prior approval? I do that for a certain subset of tools (e.g. run tests, do requests, run queri…

Yes, that's what I meant. I wasn't sure if you meant classic tab-based autocomplete or Copilot tool-based agent Copilot.

Letting it burn tokens on running tests and refactors (but not letting it merge branches or deploy) is the thing that feels like a huge leap forward to me. We are talking about the same set of capabilities.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#608

Post by CamperBob2 »

latexr wrote: post #603
CamperBob2 wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atom bombs also fit: They are basically useless Let's ask your friendly local Ukrainian refugee about that. People are having romantic relationships with their chatbots and committing suicide because of them. That is harm. So the only permissible technologies are those suitable for use by children and the mentally disturbed. I see.

> Let's ask your friendly local Ukrainian refugee about that. You understand “basically useless” does not mean “entirely useless”, right? That’s why the word “basically” is there. I know Ukrainian people. I know Ukrainian people who are in attacked cities right now . They are friendly, and all of them would understand my point. > So the only permissible technologies are those suitable for use by children and the ment…

Wait'll you hear about Dungeons & Dragons! As if backwards masking in rock and roll music weren't enough.

You're right, I don't have much empathy for bullshit pop-psych as an instrument of motivated reasoning. If ChatGPT can convince you to kill yourself, you weren't mentally healthy to begin with, and something else would have eventually had the same effect on you. Either that, or you were an unsupervised child, victimized not by a chatbot but by your parents. A tragedy either way, but good faith requires us to place the blame where it's actually due.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#609

Post by nl »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #528
nl wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a pretty decent programmer. It's interesting that some months ago when his nanochat project came out the HN Anti-AI crowd celebrated him saying "I tried to use claude/codex agents a few times but they just didn't work well enough at all and net unhelpful, possibly the repo is too far off the data distribution" But now it is working for him he's suddenly not an expert... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

> But now it is working for him he's suddenly not an expert... Or maybe he didn't lie then but is lying now?

Calling him a liar seems fairly unnecessary? For one thing people's minds can change, or that can be talking in different contexts. Or - as in this case - new technology could have been deployed that changed the game.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#610

Post by nl »

nl wrote: post #606
timr wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. No strict line, and it's always going to be subjective and a little bit silly to categorize, but when I'm debating this argument I'm thinking: a product that does not exist today (obviously many parts of even a novel product will be completely derivative, and that's fine), with multiple views, controllers, and models, and a non-trivial amount of domain-specific business logic. Likely 50k+ lines of code…

I don't think anyone is claiming they can one-shot a 50k line SAAS app. I think you'd get close on something like Lovable but that's not really one shot either.

But re-reading your statement you seem to be claiming that there are no 50k SAAS apps that are build even using multi-shot techniques (ie, building a feature at a time).

In that case my Vibe-Prolog project would count: https://github.com/nlothian/Vibe-Prolog/

  - It's 45K of python code
  - It isn't a duplicate of another program (indeed, the reason it isn't finished is because it is stuck between ISO Prolog and SWI Prolog and I need to think about how to resolve this, but I don't know enough Prolog!)
  - Not a *single* line of code is hand written.
Ironically this doesn't really prove that the current frontier models are better because large amounts of code were written with non-frontier models (You can sort of get an idea of what models were used with the labels on https://github.com/nlothian/Vibe-Prolog/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3...)

But - importantly - this project is what convinced me that the frontier models are much better than the previous generation. There were numerous times I tried the same thing in a non-Frontier model which couldn't do it, and then I'd try it in Claude, Codex or Gemini and it would succeed.

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