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

English is a terrible language for deterministic outcomes in complex/complicated systems. Vibe coders won't understand this until they are 2 years into building the thing.

LLMs have their merits and he sometimes aludes to them, although it almost feels accidental.

Also, you don't spend years studying computer science to learn the language/syntax, but rather the concepts and systems, which don't magically disappear with vibe coding.

This whole direction is a cheeky Trojan horse. A dramatic problem, hidden in a flashy solution, to which a fix will be upsold 3 years from now.

I'm excited to come back to this comment in 3 years.

I think that you seem to be under the impression that Karpathy somehow alluded to or hinted at that in his talk, which indicates you haven't actually watched the talk, which makes your first point kind of weird.

I feel like one of the stronger points he made, was that you cannot treat the LLMs as something they're explicitly not, so why would anyone expect deterministic outcomes from them?

He's making the case for coding with LLMs, not letting the LLMs go by themselves writing code ("vibe coding"), and understanding how they work before attempting to do so.

The disclaimer you mention was indeed mentioned, although it's "in one ear, out the other" with most of his audience.

If I give you a glazed donut with a brief asterisk about how sugar can cause diabetes will it stop you from eating the donut?

You also expect deterministic outcomes when making analogies with power plants and fabs.

Particularly not a 40min video.

Maybe it is tongue-in-cheek, maybe I am serious. I am not sure myself. But sometimes the interesting discussions comes from what is on top of the posters mind when viewing the title. Is that bad?