Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

Tight feedback loops are the key in working productively with software. I see that in codebases up to 700k lines of code (legacy 30yo 4GL ERP systems).

The best part is that AI-driven systems are fine with running even more tight loops than what a sane human would tolerate.

Eg. running full linting, testing and E2E/simulation suite after any minor change. Or generating 4 versions of PR for the same task so that the human could just pick the best one.

The problem is that every time you run your full automation with linting and tests, you’re filling up the context window more and more. I don’t know how people using Claude do it with its <300k context window. I get the “your message will exceed the length of this chat” message so many times.