Karpathy on Programming

Re:Karpathy on Programming by credit_guy on Friday December 26, 2025 @09:02PM (#46398416)

I feel exactly like Karpathy here. I have some work to do, and I know exactly what I need to do, and I'm able to explain it to AI, and the AI seems to understand me (I'm lately using Opus 4.5). I wrote down a roadmap, it should take me a few weeks of coding. It feels like with a proper workflow with AI agents, this work should be doable in one or two days. Yet, I know by now that it's not going to be nearly that fast. I'll be lucky if I finish 30% faster than if I just code the entire damn thing myself. The thing is, I am a huge AI optimist, I'm not one of the AI skeptics, not even close. Karpathy is not an AI skeptic. We just both feel this sense of possibility, and the fact that we can't make AI help us more is frustrating. That's all. There's no telling anyone else "it's on you if you can't make it work for you". I think Karpathy figured out by now, and at least I did, that the number of AI skeptics by now far outnumbers the number of AI optimists, and it has become something akin to a political conviction. It's quite futile to try and change someone's mind about whether AI is good, bad, overhyped, underused, etc. People picked their side and that's that.

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Re:Karpathy on Programming by design2203 on Saturday December 27, 2025 @06:30AM (#46401050)

“We just both feel this sense of possibility, and the fact that we can't make AI help us more is frustrating”

The mirage is alluring.

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Re:Karpathy on Programming by nextworddev on Saturday December 27, 2025 @08:41AM (#46401785)

The real mirage is the utility of median developers

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Re:Karpathy on Programming by jennyholzer3 on Monday December 29, 2025 @05:29PM (#46426602)

give them better incentives

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Re:Karpathy on Programming by jeltz on Monday December 29, 2025 @05:50PM (#46426919)

I think with better processes and training they could be. It is just that right now we do not train them and put them through scrum and other horrible processes. Median developers are bad due to bad management.

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Re:Karpathy on Programming by llmslave2 on Monday December 29, 2025 @03:34PM (#46425247)

I think you articulated perfectly why it's a bubble and why execs are so eager to push it everywhere. It's so alluring, it constantly feels like we're on the verge of something great. No wonder so many people have their brains fried by it.

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Re:Karpathy on Programming by anthonypasq on Monday December 29, 2025 @05:03PM (#46426325)

we're 10 months into agentic coding. Claude code came out in march. I dont understand how you are so unimaginative to think what this might look like in 5 years even with slow progress.

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Re:Karpathy on Programming by llmslave2 on Monday December 29, 2025 @05:17PM (#46426447)

It might be genuinely useful in 5 years, my issue is how it's being marketed now. We're 6 months into "AI will be writing 90% of code in three months" among other ridiculous statements.

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Re:Karpathy on Programming by jennyholzer3 on Monday December 29, 2025 @05:33PM (#46426667)

I don't mean to be inflammatory but I am not at all convinced that LLMs will be useful for software development in 5 years!

I think LLMs are very well marketed but I don't think they're very good at writing code and I don't think they've gotten better at it!

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Re:Karpathy on Programming by llmslave2 on Monday December 29, 2025 @05:42PM (#46426786)

I sort of agree. If anything I feel like they've gotten a bit worse, but the advances in the tooling around them (eg claude code) has masked that slightly.

I think they are useful as an augmentation, but largely valueless for directly outputting code. Who knows if that will change. It's still made me more productive as a dev despite not oneshotting entire files. It's just not industry-changing, at least yet.

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Re:Karpathy on Programming by jeltz on Monday December 29, 2025 @05:48PM (#46426889)

Agreed. It is very similar to gambling in how it tricks the human mind. I am sure some of this AI technology will prove yo be useful but the breakthrough has been just around the corner since soon after ChatGPT was released.

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Re:Karpathy on Programming by orwin on Monday December 29, 2025 @05:35PM (#46426684)

If I can reassure you, if your project is complex enough and involve heavy data manipulation, a 30% improvement using Opus/Gemini 3/codex 5.2 seems like a good result. I think on complex tasks, Opus 4.5 improves my output by around 20-25%.

And since it's way, way less wrong than sonnet4, it might also improve my whole team velocity.

I won't lie, AI coding has been a net negative for the 'lazy devs' on my team who don't delves into their own generated code (by 'lazy devs' here I mean the subset of devs who do the work but often don't bother to truly understand the logic behind what they used/did. They are very good coworkers, add velue and are not really lazy, but I don't see another term for that).

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