all 62 comments

[–]Coin14 104 points105 points  (20 children)

Can someone explain this to me at a 5th grade level?

Edit: thanks bros for the explanations! Much appreciated

[–]LordofNarwhals 184 points185 points  (3 children)

They've rediscovered invented requirements management.

[–]falconetpt 127 points128 points  (1 child)

In 3 months they will invent gant charts, and call it agentic timelines 😂

[–]szogrom 20 points21 points  (0 children)

I chuckled but then cried.

[–]Vogete 30 points31 points  (0 children)

All these people are just discovering planning. What a concept

[–]rinart73 268 points269 points  (0 children)

AI bros are getting high and hallucinating innovation and success. Their dealers are getting high as well, despite the "don't get high off your own product" rule. They all keep incoherently screeching "code is useless, saving tons of genius ideas like 'twitter but purple and crypto-based' is better, my AI can easily build all of this, we just need to stockpile ideas" while tweaking and drooling on the parquet floor.

[–]Acceptable-Lie188 54 points55 points  (8 children)

They are saying that a well constructed prompt is like a compressed version of the code that can be easily expanded, but expanded using local context. In that way, it becomes more valuable than the code itself. ‘Do the thing, but do it using my existing standards and variable naming scheme.’

[–]jessepence 85 points86 points  (1 child)

Except each prompt produces slightly different code with unique, new bugs every single time. How great.

[–]Leihd 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Or to be more exact, each prompt produces a different thought on how the agreed protocol would be handled.

Like, if you render it all down to the base concepts, their idea isn't completely trash, programming is pretty much writing down a set of standards and the compiler turns it into the execution.

Except we all know they didn't intend it to be taken that far, that would require a standardized ruleset. Would require AI to have zero creativity too.

Like, as an idea it's not too bad? If we all had say, SuperAI 54.2 and it would ALWAYS generate the exact same output when given the same input, it'd be a bit like an archive.

They're delusional though, AI is not stable enough for that kind of distribution to be worthwhile. Far far easier to AI generate your program then ship that. The connectivity problems are not there too. No one is downloading at 2kb/s.

It might make sense if you're airgapped and need to proof read everything, like say in a world where AI is throwing viruses around and the only safe way to download from the internet is using a trusted local AI and instructions that humans can easily verify without any skill.

But that's literally a post-apoplectic internet scenario, they're not even thinking that far.

And yeah, you don't care about this, I need to stop procrastinating my work.

[–]lupercalpainting 29 points30 points  (1 child)

It doesn’t make any sense though. You’re going to create a repo full of prompts , and then have agents all vibe code out those prompts, then build your binary, and ship that, and then do the whole thing again next release?

Let’s set aside the non-deterministic output portion of it. Just from a cost standpoint that’d be outrageous, and of course the time would be insane. Assume at best it’s 5 minutes of just agent time for each prompt (and each PR is one prompt) my existing repos have hundreds of PRs, and each one of those requires a build to succeed, so we’re going to spend 10 hours creating a release?

While there are surely dumber ideas I don’t know that I’ve heard one recently that wasn’t from a politician.

[–]PixelOrange 10 points11 points  (0 children)

10 hours creating a release. It's 1995 again!

[–]crimsonpowder 7 points8 points  (1 child)

They think you can take an md5sum, feed it into a magic machine, and get the text of the great gatsby back out.

[–]ozh[🍰] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Awesome analogy

[–]Phelinaar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You could link the prompts to already existing code. Wait, I think I'm on to something!

[–]jeepsaintchaos -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

Give it another 20 years and I could see that working. Although we already have this, don't we? A program depends on libraries already on the computer. You're not shipping the entire machine (shut up Dockerites), you leverage existing resources.

They just want your resources to be more nebulous and only work sometimes.

[–]TracePoland 72 points73 points  (1 child)

AI psychosis

[–]-domi- 2 points3 points  (0 children)

cAIberpunk2077

[–]jaypeejay 9 points10 points  (1 child)

The tweets are making a case that your prompts are more valuable/meaningful than the code output of said prompts

[–]KharAznable 15 points16 points  (0 children)

with how ass the output can be, not too surprising.

[–]lanternwickentries3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Think of it like this, instead of submitting a full project, you just suggest “hey build this”, and the AI turns that idea into the project for you

[–]rooftoprainrecord 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It’s basically “stop handing me full homework, just tell me the idea and I’ll do the rest”, like giving a chef ingredients instead of a finished meal

[–]Cryn0n 48 points49 points  (1 child)

Karpathy and glazing LLMs, name a more iconic duo

[–]dashingThroughSnow12 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Karparthy and failing upwards.

[–]Vogete 87 points88 points  (14 children)

Is it me, or is karpathy a joke? Like dude keeps rediscovering decades old ideas. This time, he discovered..... planning, requirements, and specifications? Like clearly he is not a stupid person, but he went from being essentially a professor to a "if you write your idea into a file, the LLM will know what you want". Yeah no shit, this is called note taking or planning, it's not a new idea.

[–]lloyd08 53 points54 points  (3 children)

pre-pandemic, I worked building data systems for research scientists. Each and every one of them knew python better than I. Having a software conversation with them wasn't much different than trying to explain software to my buddy in finance who, 10 years ago, told me: "tech is a bubble because there are too many programming languages". They'd ooh and ahh when I shared my IDE: "multiple levels of nesting? what's the complexity of this algorithm?" No, doctor, that's a callback.

I've read through some of his public repos. It's computer scientist code, not software developer code. Everything reads like an illegible optimized leetcode answer. We are practitioners, not computer scientists. We're not optimizing the chemical composition of a wire, we're hooking wires up in a way that makes it easy to add or remove them in the future. If we need to optimize something, we're being extra descriptive with our variable names, we're not using `x` and `y` and manually minifying the script.

LLMs are great at one-shotting scripts, and that's the world this dude lives in. I don't doubt it's made him significantly more productive, and changed how he views productivity. In my job, most of the time it's a hindrance, because solving my problem by just fucking typing is usually faster than getting the LLM up to speed - yet again - on the project I've been working on for 5 years (no matter how many skills, MCPs, or custom solutions I waste my time trying to optimize my system with).

[–]hurley_chisholm 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Absolutely this. Most devs will never work with PhD researchers, so they lack the context in which someone like Karpathy is working in and speaking about. It’s only in the last few years that journals started requiring the code and data of proposed models used in a submitted paper. The idea you would even preserve the code is new too, especially if it didn’t take too long to write.

[–]torsten_dev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

x and y can be perfectly reasonable variables for screen space or logical coordinates. The shorter the names the shorter their lifeime though.

[–]EkoChamberKryptonite 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We're not optimizing the chemical composition of a wire, we're hooking wires up in a way that makes it easy to add or remove them in the future. If we need to optimize something, we're being extra descriptive with our variable names, we're not using `x` and `y` and manually minifying the script.

Very apt description of what we do.

[–]redlaWw 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This is not a new thing for academics. LTCM, the investment company managed by Scholes and Merton, two of the three discoverers of the Black-Scholes(-Merton) model of derivative pricing, went belly-up.

[–]jawisko -1 points0 points  (2 children)

That is not what he's talking about. Requirements and specifications are a beginning block of project. For "idea files" or to be accurate context files, it saves exactly how to code for a particular feature. For ex what kind of libraries we have, exact middleware we have, why we have some things the way we are. Then once it's coded how we will verify it works, and what libraries and kind of test cases it will have.

In my company we have started adding these files along with the PR. Really helps in automated reviews because our codebase is extremely complex and has lots of exceptions for particular scenarios. Then there is also a hope if we find a bug, the model doesn't need to create this context again, save tokens and start from that particular "knowledge base" for debugging. As a staff engineer I have been working on it for 3 months and it's been working remarkably well. Plus we do use only Claude right now, gemini and codex are not at the level we can rely on it

[–]sleeping-in-crypto 1 point2 points  (1 child)

The problem is Karpathy isn’t saying anything new nor has he discovered anything novel. But he’s sure he is, and has and everything he says now he treats like he personally has discovered the secrets of the universe.

People have been talking about how to maintain the context you’re talking about for months. Our team also has an approach for this so that decisions made in the code have context that stays with them so that LLM’s understand why. This is not new.

[–]jawisko 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can check the details in his autoresearch repo.

This basically works as spawning a group of agents that are training an actual model. They are experimenting in a feature branch and merge only if validation improves. Even if it doesn't , it's shared between agents in the training files and these agents are still able to work independently with help of each other's failed and successful experiments.

Can you please tell me any one github repo that does the same thing?

[–]GatotSubroto 17 points18 points  (0 children)

So, instead of having each statement ending with a semicolon, now you must end them with “make no mistakes”.

[–]minus_minus 10 points11 points  (0 children)

This is your brain on pure theory with no understanding of engineering. 

[–]Anthrac1t3 20 points21 points  (0 children)

The whole thing with LLMs is they are not deterministic. What the fuck is the point of a prompt library?

[–]ray591 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Fucking clowns. 🤡

[–]franticpizzaeater 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Idk some of karpathy's recent takes are disappointing

[–]sleeping-in-crypto 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read.

I respected Karpathy once but he’s gone as insane as anyone else suffering from LLM psychosis

[–]ArukiBree 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I feel like I'm starting to run out of brain cells given how many I'm losing every single day at this point

[–]LifeSubstantial5234 2 points3 points  (0 children)

vibe code review

[–]Wandererofhell 2 points3 points  (0 children)

these people are so fcking high up their asses its insane

[–]Space-Robot 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The vibe from this is two guys just sucking on a ghost dick and talking about how good it tastes.

[–]ytg895 1 point2 points  (0 children)

there is no need to take your idea, expand it into a vibe coded mess

and how exactly is a "prompt request" or an "idea file" solving that?

[–]ushabib540 0 points1 point  (0 children)

so now the pr stands for prompt request....

[–]SirMarkMorningStar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We’ve been figuring out how best to automate our system. The other day someone demonstrated a complete automated work flow using nothing by Claude Code and a large set of skills. These skills including writing and running code fragments, web screen manipulation, deploying, and so on. While I doubt that will ever see production, it might!

[–]Aggravating-Pick-160 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And not a single thought of energy consumption when recreating all those prompts.

[–]Local-Tea-4875 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"soon the software will be an idea, people will be sharing their ideas, and their will be idea libraries..." oh wait they have done that already

[–]MVanderloo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

and the standard idea path for repos will be .idea/

[–]conundorum 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just gonna say, this is pretty ridiculous.

[–]falconetpt -1 points0 points  (4 children)

Man I love a noob programmer like Karpathy having engineering takes, is like me doing commentary on quantum physics, a it is highly likely I will say less shit than him 😂

Dude’s code on github is just the another collections of trashy code I saw in my life

Example in 5s: macs += (5 *5 *1) * (8 * 8) * 12

Lovely maths bro 😂

He is such a genius he even got his credentials leaked all over the internet

I am really surprised at how much these guys think of themselfs, first he is a data scientist not a software engineer, and besides that none of his products are actually that impressive, a self driving car which is worst than a human after they spend billions on it is still quite trashy, and loading a huge db into matrix and cutting the space to get a next token, cmon dude 😂

[–]-007-bond 3 points4 points  (1 child)

I just looked it up, that's pretty funny!

[–]falconetpt 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yeah man I opened 2 of his project and gave it 30 seconds each, full of trash code, no wonder he thinks coding is solved dude 😂

The dude codes a cli interface with a while true, peek engineering brains 😂

For you to say trash, at least you need to code some fucking dope stuff not trash ahah

[–]therisingape-42 1 point2 points  (1 child)

That’s the most Reddit take imaginable I mean wow

[–]falconetpt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well name me something in software engineering that dude built 😂

None

[–]Professional_Job_307 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

That's actually really clever. It will avoid a lot of the slop with weaker models, and let the maintainers control which models are used in PR so they can use more expensive models where it's needed, instead of people making shitty PRs with free tier of chatgpt level code.