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

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1479 points sandslash | 3 comments | 19 Jun 25 00:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.495s | source
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tudorizer ◴[19 Jun 25 15:16 UTC] No.44319472[source]▶
95% terrible expression of the landscape, 5% neatly dumbed down analogies.

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.

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1. qjack ◴[19 Jun 25 17:27 UTC] No.44320728[source]▶
While I agree with you broadly, remember that those that employ you don't have those skills either. They accept that they are ceding control of the details and trust us to make those decisions or ask clarifying questions (LLMs are getting better at those things too). Vibe coders are clients seeking an alternative, not developers.
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2. tudorizer ◴[19 Jun 25 17:31 UTC] No.44320767[source]▶
> Vibe coders are clients seeking an alternative, not developers.

Agreed. That's genuinely a good framing for clients.

3. unshavedyak ◴[19 Jun 25 17:40 UTC] No.44320840[source]▶
Maybe i'm not "vibing" enough, but i've actually been testing this recently. So far i think the thing "vibing" helps most with for me personally is just making decisions which i'm often too tired to do after work.

I've been coming to the realization that working with LLMs offer a different set of considerations than working on your own. Notably i find that i often obsess about design, code location, etc because if i get it wrong then my precious after-work time and energy are wasted on refactoring. The larger the code base, the more crippling this becomes for me.

However refactoring is almost not an issue with LLMs. They do it very quickly and aggressively. So the areas i'm not vibing on is just reviewing, and ensuring it isn't committing any insane sins. .. because it definitely will. But the structure i'm accepting is far from what i'd make myself. We'll see how this pans out long term for me, but it's a strategy that i'm exploring.

On the downside, my biggest difficulty with LLMs is getting them to just.. not. To produce less. Choosing too large of tasks is very easy and the code can snowball before you have a chance to pump the breaks and course correct.

Still, it's been a positive experience so far. I still consider it vibing though because i'm accepting far less quality work than what i'd normally produce. In areas where it matters though, i enforce correctness, and have to review everything as a result.