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ashwinsundar • today at 5:40 AM • 4 replies • view on HN

Hot take: you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you aren't writing code, designing the system, creating architecture, or even writing the prompt, then you're not understanding shit. You're playing slots with stochastic parrots

    The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
- Karpathy 2025

Replies

simonw • today at 5:47 AM

Your Karpathy quote there is out of context. It starts with: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

  There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe
  coding", where you fully give in to the
  vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget
  that the code even exists.
Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding. If you're paying attention to the code that's being produced you can guide it towards being just as high quality (or even higher quality) than code you would have written by hand.
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stavros • today at 11:27 AM

There are two ways to approach this. One is a priori: "If you aren't doing the same things with LLMs that humans do when writing code, the code is not going to work".

The other one is a posteriori: "I want code that works, what do I need to do with LLMs?"

Your approach is the former, which I don't think works in reality. You can write code that works (for some definition of "works") with LLMs without doing it the way a human would do it.

ChrisGreenHeur • today at 10:22 AM

the hardware you typed this on was designed by hardware architects that write little to no code. just types up a spec to be implemented by verilog coders.

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imiric • today at 6:59 AM

> Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away.

It's insane that this quote is coming from one of the leading figures in this field. And everyone's... OK that software development has been reduced to chance and brute force?

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