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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”

#621

Post by timr »

simonw wrote: post #607
timr wrote: post #601

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? 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.

Ah, definitely agent-based copilot. I don't even have the autocomplete stuff turned on anymore, because I found it annoying.

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

#622

Post by aspenmartin »

kloop wrote: post #539
atonse wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But wouldn’t the models get better at fixing complicated code eventually?

We don't know. We seem to be hitting diminishing returns, but we don't exactly know where it will stop

Is there a source for this? Scaling laws work and we have about 4 orders of magnitude in the exponential growth before we run into true bottlenecks

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

#623

Post by LtWorf »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #570
reconnecting wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is common ground, as per my initial message. Only one AI company spends billions of dollars yearly on marketing their software to make it work. I work on open-source software development on a bootstrapped basis. My input is: water, nutrition, a bit of electricity, and beliefs and the output is a fairly complex logical system like software. AI's input is billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of people's liv…

To answer your question in other words: if you spent the same amount of resources on human intelligence If AI tools don't amplify and magnify your own intelligence, it's not their fault. If the advances turn out to be illusory, on the other hand, they'll be unwound soon enough. We generally don't stick with expensive technology that doesn't work. At the same time, fortunately, we also don't generally wait for your ap…

> We generally don't stick with expensive technology that doesn't work.

Homeopathy is still around…

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

#624

Post by CamperBob2 »

LtWorf wrote: post #623
CamperBob2 wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To answer your question in other words: if you spent the same amount of resources on human intelligence If AI tools don't amplify and magnify your own intelligence, it's not their fault. If the advances turn out to be illusory, on the other hand, they'll be unwound soon enough. We generally don't stick with expensive technology that doesn't work. At the same time, fortunately, we also don't generally wait for your ap…

> We generally don't stick with expensive technology that doesn't work. Homeopathy is still around…

D'oh, you got me there.

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

#625

Post by pzo »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #542
pzo wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had few projects like that this year and I can say it how messy and demotivating its to cleaning up mess. And its actually not well paid because client now has the expectation that mostly everything is now done, you have to just only fix few things and you even have AI at your disposal so expect that you just write a better magic prompt. I think actually often its faster and cheaper to start from scratch or at leas…

Would you be able to share any more details on the clean up projects you had to do? Like, wasn't front or back end, which tech stack, where were the LLM code issues etc. I'm just very curious where we are at the moment with in this profession.

the project was iOS app and vibe coded in Claude Code - it was around half year ago so maybe things improved. Client actually knew some coding so actually quite impressive how far they did manage to go along.

However it was just adding pile of feature after features without taking time to refactor it. Client most likely did some few different attempts to add some specific feature or fixing something and there was a lot of dead code that haven't been used. This dead code actually confused AI and often tried to modify part of code that have been abandoned.

There was completely no tests. No performance tests. And some part of my job was to improve performance (cv/ai model inference) and robustness (crashes, memory leaks).

I think AI is fine and useful but whats bad with such vibe coded project if somebody hand over to you is you have completely no clue what part of the code are written/designed properly with good foundation if previous developer didn't test extensively and didn't refactor continuously. Even worse if you cannot talk to previous developer responsible for the project.

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

#626

Post by viccis »

59nadir wrote: post #538
viccis wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that's true, but I will say that one of the reasons I recommend his Python ML videos to people is not just the ML content but also his Python is good and idiomatic. So I would not agree; I think his programming is a well practiced skill. FWIW though I think his predicted worldview will render it very difficult to acquire this skill, as people grow reliant on gen AI for programming rudiments.

As far as "programming skill" goes, writing "good and idiomatic" Python is pretty bottom of the barrel. I don't think the GP is all that off, most people who are famous for some programming-adjacent skill (or even programming) aren't good at programming.

>As far as "programming skill" goes, writing "good and idiomatic" Python is pretty bottom of the barrel.

Complete bullshit. Beginning programmers writing good and idiomatic Python isn't "bottom of the barrel", or did you think I was recommending his videos to 20 year seasoned pros to improve their coding?

Some people on this site need to check their arrogance and humble themselves a bit before opening their mouths.

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

#627

Post by ragequittah »

enraged_camel wrote: post #471
data-ottawa wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write a lot of SQL and I haven't had these issues for months, even with smaller models. Opus can one shot most of my queries faster than I could type them. Instead of stuffing the context with DDL I suggest: 1. Reorganize your data warehouse. It needs to be easy to find the correct data. Make sure you use ELT clear layers, meaningful schemas, and have per-model documentation. This is a ton of work, but if done righ…

>> I write a lot of SQL and I haven't had these issues for months, even with smaller models. Opus can one shot most of my queries faster than I could type them. Same. SOTA models crush every SQL question I give them.

I think this might be a big part of the problem with the conversation about AI right now. The models have become so much better in the last ~6 months in my experience and lots of people wrote them off 1-2 years ago after they couldn't do x and 'we've hit a wall' was being thrown around everywhere.

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

#628

Post by karakoram »

rambojohnson wrote: post #58

What exhausts me isn’t “falling behind.” It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore. This agentic arms race by C-suite know-nothings feels less like leverage and more like denial. We took a stochastic text generator, noticed it lies confidently, wipes entire databases and hard…

A career pivot sounds interesting. Any ideas or recommendations for others considering this? I have seen someone leave SWE to become a commercial pilot which was pretty cool.

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

#629

Post by HellDunkel »

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…

>> 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 single 24GB GPU. Natural language driven Unreal engines are viable outputs today given local only code gen.

what drugs are you using?

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

#630

Post by d675 »

furyofantares wrote: post #179
ekropotin wrote: post #171

If Karpathy feels behind, imaging how we, regular folks feel

I've worked really hard over the last year at working out how to use these things, and it has more than paid off. But I think if I had started learning today instead of a year ago, I'd get up to speed in more like 6 months instead of a year. A lot of stuff I learned a year ago is not really necessary anymore, but furthermore, there's just a lot more information out there about how to use these from people who have be…

how has it paid off for you?
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