[HN Gopher] LLM Year in Review
___________________________________________________________________
LLM Year in Review
Author : swyx
Score : 346 points
Date : 2025-12-19 20:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (karpathy.bearblog.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (karpathy.bearblog.dev)
| swyx wrote:
| xposted to https://x.com/karpathy/status/2002118205729562949
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| And also accessible sans login via
| https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2002118205729562949 .
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I think one of the things that is missing from this post is
| engaging a bit in trying to answer: what are the highest priority
| AI-related problems that the industry should seek to tackle?
|
| Karpathy hints at one major capability unlock being UI
| generation, so instead of interacting with text the AI can
| present different interfaces depending on the kind of problem.
| That seems like a severely underexplored problem domain so far.
| Who are the key figures innovating in this space so far?
|
| In the most recent Demis interview, he suggests that one of the
| key problems that must be solved is online / continuous learning.
|
| Aside from that, another major issues is probably reducing
| hallucinations and increasing reliability. Ideally you should be
| able to deploy an LLM to work on a problem domain, and if it
| encounters an unexpected scenario it reaches out to you in order
| to figure out what to do. But for standard problems it should
| function reliably 100% of the time.
| lukax wrote:
| Google is doing that with A2UI. LLM will be able to decide how
| to present info to the user.
| victorbuilds wrote:
| Notable omission: 2025 is also when the ghosts started haunting
| the training data. Half of X replies are now LLMs responding to
| LLMs. The call is coming from inside the dataset.
| vlod wrote:
| Any tips to spot this? I want to avoid arguing with a X bot.
| shtack wrote:
| Really easy: don't argue on the internet. The approach has
| many benefits.
| jckahn wrote:
| Also, don't use X.
| bdangubic wrote:
| also, please just do not use X
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Ok, fine, but do you have a better way to build a bot
| following and expose oneself to trending MAGA memes?
| bdangubic wrote:
| "truth" social :)
| thoughtpeddler wrote:
| I appreciate Andrej's optimistic spirit, and I am grateful that
| he dedicates so much of his time to educating the wider public
| about AI/LLMs. That said, it would be great to hear his
| perspective on how 2025 changed the concentration of power in the
| industry, what's happening with open-source, local inference,
| hardware constraints, etc. For example, he characterizes Claude
| Code as "running on your computer", but no, it's just the TUI
| that runs locally, with inference in the cloud. The reader is
| left to wonder how that might evolve in 2026 and beyond.
| D-Machine wrote:
| The section on Claude Code is very ambiguously and confusingly
| written, I think he meant that the _agent_ runs on your
| computer (not inference) and that this is in contrast to agents
| running "on a website" or in the cloud:
|
| > I think OpenAI got this wrong because I think they focused
| their codex / agent efforts on cloud deployments in containers
| orchestrated from ChatGPT instead of localhost. [...] CC got
| this order of precedence correct and packaged it into a
| beautiful, minimal, compelling CLI form factor that changed
| what AI looks like - it's not just a website you go to like
| Google, it's a little spirit/ghost that "lives" on your
| computer. This is a new, distinct paradigm of interaction with
| an AI.
|
| However, if so, this is definitely a distinction that needs to
| be made far more clearly.
| realcul wrote:
| Well Microsoft had thier "localhost" AI before CC but that
| was a ghost without a clear purpose or skill.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| From what I can gather, llama.cpp supports Anthropic's message
| format now[1], so you can use it with Claude Code[2].
|
| [1]: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/17570
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44654145
| karpathy wrote:
| The CC point is more about the data and environmental and
| general configuration context, not compute and where it happens
| to run today. The cloud setups are clunky because of context
| and UIUX user in the loop considerations, not because of
| compute considerations.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Agree with the GP, though -- you ought to make that clearer.
| It really reads like you're saying that CC runs locally,
| which is confusing since you obviously know better.
| karpathy wrote:
| Yeah, I made some edits to clarify.
| ramoz wrote:
| I think we need to shift our mindset on what an agent is.
| The LLM is a brain in a vat connected far away. The agent
| sits on your device, as a mech suit for that brain, and can
| pretty much do damn near anything on that machine. It's
| there, with you. The same way any desktop software is.
| simonw wrote:
| One of the most interesting coding agents to run locally is
| actually OpenAI Codex, since it has the ability to run against
| their gpt-oss models hosted by Ollama. codex
| --oss -m gpt-oss:20b
|
| Or 120b if you can fit the larger model.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| What do you find interesting about it, and how does it
| compare to commercial offerings?
| simonw wrote:
| It's rare to find a local model that's capable of running
| tools in a loop well enough to power a coding agent.
|
| I don't think gpt-oss:20b is strong enough to be honest,
| but 120b can do an OK job.
|
| Nowhere NEAR as good as the big hosted models though.
| ontouchstart wrote:
| Think of it as the early years of UNIX & PC. Running
| inferences and tools locally and offline opens doors to
| new industries. We might not even need client/server
| paradigm locally. LLM is just a probabilistic library we
| can call.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Thanks.
| ramoz wrote:
| What he meant was, agents will probably not be these web
| abstractions that run in deployed services (langchain, crew);
| agents meaning the Harnesses (software wrapper) specifically
| that call the LLM API.
|
| It runs on your computer because of its tooling. It can call
| Bash. It can literally do anything on the operating system and
| file system. That's what makes it different. You should think
| of it like a mech suit. The model is just the brain in a vat
| connected far away.
| bgwalter wrote:
| Vibe coding is sufficient for job hoppers who never finish
| anything and leave when the last 20% have to be figured out. Much
| easier to promote oneself as an expert and leave the hard parts
| to other people.
| zingar wrote:
| I've found incredible productivity gains writing (vibe coding)
| tools for myself that will never need to be "productionised" or
| even used by another person. Heck even I will probably never
| use the latest log retrieval tool, which exists purely for
| Claude code to invoke it. There is a ton of useful software yet
| to be written for which there _is_ no "last 20%".
| diamond559 wrote:
| These tools are so useful and make you so much more
| "productive" that you don't think anyone else would want to
| pay anything for them huh? Did your boss at least give you a
| big raise for your "productivity" increase, or maybe lay off
| some of your underperforming coworkers bc you are just so
| much better now?
| simonw wrote:
| Do you mean vibe coding as-in producing unreviewed code with
| LLMs and prompting at it until it appears to work, or vibe
| coding as a catch-all for any time someone uses AI-assistance
| to help them write code?
| bgwalter wrote:
| Karpathy uses the term for all of this in the exuberant
| paragraph 5. of his blog post.
| augment_me wrote:
| All software is not meant to be open-source, in production and
| working on 100 platforms.
|
| Sometimes the point of the software is to make an app with 2
| buttons for your mom to help her do her grocery shopping easier
| delichon wrote:
| > I like this version of the meme for pointing out that human
| intelligence is also jagged in its own different way.
|
| The idea of jaggedicity seems useful to advancing epistemology.
| If we could identify the domains that have useful data that we
| fail to extract, we could fill those holes and eventually become
| a general intelligence ourselves. The task may be as hard as
| making a list of your blind spots. But now we have an alien
| intelligence with an outside perspective. While making AI less
| jagged it might return the favor.
|
| If we keep inventing different kinds of intelligence the sum of
| the splats may eventually become well rounded.
| visarga wrote:
| I don't think it will become well rounded because that is not
| cost sensitive. Intelligence is sensitive to cost, it is the
| core constraint shaping it. Any action has a cost - energy,
| materials, time, opportunity or social. Intelligence is solving
| the cost equation, if we can't solve it we die. Cost is also
| why we specialize, in a group we can offload some intelligence
| to others. LLMs also have their own costs, and are shaped by it
| into some kind of jagged intelligence, they are no spherical
| cows either.
| mvkel wrote:
| > In this world view, nano banana is a first early hint of what
| that might look like.
|
| What is he referring to here? Is nano banana not just an image
| gen model? Is it because it's an LLM-based one, and not
| diffusion?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I think he is referring to capability, not architecture, and
| say that NB is at the point that it is suggestive of the near-
| future capability of using GenAI models to create their own UI
| as needed.
|
| NB (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) isn't the first major-vendor LLM-
| based image gen model, after all; GPT Image 1 was first.
| simonw wrote:
| What's interesting about Nano Banana (and even more so video
| models like Veo 3) is that they act as a weird kind of world
| model when you consider that they accept images as input and
| return images as output.
|
| Give it an image of a maze, it can output that same image with
| the maze completed (maybe).
|
| There's a fantastic article about that for image-to-video
| models here: https://video-zero-shot.github.io/
|
| > We demonstrate that Veo 3 can zero-shot solve a broad variety
| of tasks it wasn't explicitly trained for: segmenting objects,
| detecting edges, editing images, understanding physical
| properties, recognizing object affordances, simulating tool
| use, and much more.
| starchild3001 wrote:
| The distinction Karpathy draws between "growing animals" and
| "summoning ghosts" via RLVR is the mental model I didn't know I
| needed to explain the current state of jagged intelligence. It
| perfectly articulates why trust in benchmarks is collapsing; we
| aren't creating generally adaptive survivors, but rather over-
| optimizing specific pockets of the embedding space against
| verifiable rewards.
|
| I'm also sold on his take on "vibe coding" leading to ephemeral
| software; the idea of spinning up a custom, one-off tokenizer or
| app just to debug a single issue, and then deleting it, feels
| like a real shift.
| graemefawcett wrote:
| I've been doing it for months, it's lovely
|
| https://tech.lgbt/@graeme/115749759729642908
|
| It's a stack based on finishing the job Jupyter started. Fences
| as functions, callable and composable.
|
| Same shape as an MCP. No training required, just walk them
| through the patterns.
|
| Literally, it's spatially organized. Turns out a woman named
| Mrs Curwen and I share some thoughts on pedagogy.
|
| There does in fact exist a functor that maps 18th century piano
| instruction to context engineering. We play with it
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > The distinction Karpathy draws between "growing animals" and
| "summoning ghosts" via RLVR
|
| I don't see these descriptions as very insightful.
|
| The difference between general/animal intelligence and
| jagged/LLM intelligence is simply that humans/animals really
| ARE intelligent (the word was created to describe this human
| capability), while LLMs are just echoing narrow portions of the
| intelligent output of humans (those portions that are amenable
| to RLVR capture).
|
| For an artificial intelligence to be intelligent in it's own
| right, and therefore be generally intelligent, it would need to
| need - like an animal - to be embodied (even if only
| virtually), autonomous, predicting the outcomes of it's own
| actions (not auto-regressively trained), learning incrementally
| and continually, built with innate traits like curiosity and
| boredom to put and keep itself in learning situations, etc.
|
| Of course not all animals are generally intelligent - many
| (insects, fish, reptiles, many birds) just have narrow "hard
| coded" instinctual behaviors, but others like humans are
| generalists who evolution have therefore honed for adaptive
| lifetime learning and general intelligence.
| fourside wrote:
| > I'm also sold on his take on "vibe coding" leading to
| ephemeral software; the idea of spinning up a custom, one-off
| tokenizer or app just to debug a single issue, and then
| deleting it, feels like a real shift.
|
| We should keep in mind that currently our LLM use is
| subsidized. When the money dries up and we have to pay the real
| prices I'll be interested to see if we can still consider
| whipping up one time apps as basically free
| mips_avatar wrote:
| I would love Andrej's take on the fast models we got this year.
| Gemini 3 flash and Grok 4 fast have no business being as good +
| cheap + fast as they are. For Andrej's prediction about LLMs
| communicating with us via a visual interface we're going to need
| fast models, but I feel like AI twitter/HN has mostly ignored
| these.
| gnerd00 wrote:
| check out Sasha Luccioni
| mips_avatar wrote:
| Do you have a link to anything they wrote about this?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Just guessing here, but these small models may well be
| essentially distillations of larger ones, with this being where
| their power comes from. e.g. Use a large model to generate
| synthetic reasoning traces, then train a small model on those.
| jkubicek wrote:
| > In the same way, LLMs should speak to us in our favored format
| - in images, infographics, slides, whiteboards,
| animations/videos, web apps, etc.
|
| You think every Electron app out there re-inventing application
| UX from scratch is bad, wait until LLMs are generating their own
| custom UX for every single action for every user for every
| device. What does command-W do in this app? It's literally
| impossible to predict, try it and see!
| johnfn wrote:
| On the other side of the spectrum, I see some of the latest
| agents, like Codex, take care to get accessibility right --
| something not even many humans bother to do.
| becquerel wrote:
| It's an extension of how I've noticed that AIs will generally
| write very buttoned-down, cross-the-ts-and-dot-the-is code.
| Everything gets commented, every method has a try-catch with
| a log statement, every return type is checked, etc. I think
| it's a consequence of them not feeling fatigue. These things
| (accessibility included) are all things humans generally know
| they 'should' do, but there never seems to be enough time in
| the day; we'll get to it later when we're less tired. But the
| ghost in the machine doesn't care. It operates at the same
| level all the time
| Aiisnotabubble wrote:
| But that's exactly what an LLM solved.
|
| It's the best ui ever.
|
| It understands a lot of languages and abstract concepts.
|
| It will not be necessary at all to let LLM generate random uis.
|
| I'm not a native English speaker. I sometimes just throw in a
| German word and it just works.
| tim333 wrote:
| >our favored format - in images, infographics, slides,
| whiteboards, animations/videos, web apps, etc
|
| If you look at how humans actually communicate I'd guess #1 is
| text/speech, #2 pictures
| ausbah wrote:
| tl;dr seems like llms are maturing on the product side and for
| day-day usage
| socketcluster wrote:
| For me, Claude Code was the most impressive innovation this year.
| Cursor was a good proof of concept but Claude Code is the tool
| that actually got me to use LLMs for coding.
|
| The kind of code that Claude produces looks almost exactly like
| the code I would write myself. It's like it's reading my mind.
| This is a game changer because I can maintain the code that
| Claude produces.
|
| With Claude Code, there are no surprises. I can pretty much guess
| what its code will look like 90% to 95% of the time but it writes
| it a lot faster than I could. This is an amazing innovation.
|
| Gemini is quite impressive as well. Nano banana in particular is
| very useful for graphic design.
|
| I haven't tried Gemini with coding yet but TBH, Claude Code does
| such a great job; if I could code any faster, I would get
| decision fatigue. I don't like rushing into architecture or UX
| decisions. I like to sit on certain decisions for a day or two
| before starting implementation. Once you start in a particular
| direction, it's hard to undo and you may try to double down on
| the mistake due to sunk cost fallacy. I try hard to avoid that.
| tarsinge wrote:
| I don't have much time to evaluate tools every months and I
| have settled on Cursor. I'm curious on what I'm missing when
| using the same models?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| If you switch to Codex you will get a lot of tokens for $200,
| enough to more consistently use high reasoning as well.
| Cursor is simply far more expensive so you end up using less
| or using dumber models.
|
| Claude Code is overrated as it uses many of its features and
| modalities to compensate for model shortcomings that are not
| as necessary for steering state of the art models like GPT
| 5.2
| ccmcarey wrote:
| I disagree, the claude models seem the best at tool
| calling, opus 4.5 seems the smartest, and claude code (+
| claude model) seems to make good use of subagents and
| planning in a way that codex doesn't
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Opus 4.5 is so bad at instruction following (30% worse
| per benchmark shared above) that it requires a manual
| toggle for plan mode.
|
| GPT 5.2 simply obeys instruction to assemble a plan and
| avoids the need to compensate for poor steerability that
| would require the user to manually manage modalities.
|
| Opus has improved though so the plan mode is less
| necessary than it was before, but it is still far behind
| state of art steerability.
| MrOrelliOReilly wrote:
| I think this is a total misunderstanding of Anthropic's
| place in the AI race. Opus 4.5 is absolutely a state of the
| art model. I won't knock anyone for preferring Codex, but I
| think you're ignoring official and unofficial benchmarks.
|
| See: https://artificialanalysis.ai
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| > Opus 4.5 is absolutely a state of the art model.
|
| > See: https://artificialanalysis.ai
|
| The field moves fast. Per artificialanalysis, Opus 4.5 is
| currently behind GPT-5.2 (x-high) and Gemini 3 Pro. Even
| Google's cheaper Gemini 3 Flash model seems to be
| slightly ahead of Opus 4.5.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/webdev
|
| LM Arena shows Claude Opus 4.5 on top
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I wonder how model competence and/or user preference on
| web development (that leaderboard) carries over to more
| complex and larger projects, or more generally anything
| other than web development ?
|
| In addition to whatever they are exposed to as part of
| pre-training, it'd be interesting to know what kind of
| coding tasks these models are being RL-trained for? Are
| things like web development and maybe Python/ML coding
| overemphasized, or are they also being trained on things
| like Linux/Windows/embedded development etc in different
| languages?
| ramoz wrote:
| https://x.com/giansegato/status/2002203155262812529/photo
| /1
|
| https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/2002203627377574113
|
| > Even Google's cheaper Gemini 3 Flash model seems to be
| slightly ahead of Opus 4.5.
|
| What an insane take for anybody uses these models daily.
| MrOrelliOReilly wrote:
| Yes, I personally feel that the "official" benchmarks are
| increasingly diverging from the everyday reality of using
| these models. My theory is that we are reaching a point
| where all the models are intelligent enough for day-to-
| day queries, so points like style/personality and proper
| use of web queries and other capabilities are better
| differentiators than intelligence alone.
| MrOrelliOReilly wrote:
| Totally, however OP's point was that Claude had to
| compensate for deficiencies versus a state of the art
| model like ChatGPT 5.2. I don't think that's correct.
| Whether or not Opus 4.5 is actually #1 on these
| benchmarks, it is clearly very competitive with the other
| top-tier models. I didn't take "state of the art" to here
| narrowly mean #1 on a given benchmark, but rather to mean
| near or at the frontier of current capabilities.
| gessha wrote:
| One thing to remember when comparing ML models of any
| kind is that single value metrics obscure a lot of nuance
| and you really have to go through the model results one
| by one to see how it performs. This is true for vision,
| NLP, and other modalities.
| fzzzy wrote:
| is x-high fast enough to use as a coding agent?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Yes, if you parallelize your work, which you must learn
| to do if you want the best quality
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| What am I missing? As suspicious as benchmarks are, your
| link shows GPT 5.2 to be superior.
|
| It is also out of date as it does not include 5.2 Codex.
|
| Per my point about steerability compensated for by
| modalities and other harness features: Opus 4.5 scores
| 58% while GPT 5.2 scores 75% for the instruction
| following benchmark in your link! Thanks for the hard
| evidence - GPT 5.2 is 30% ahead of Opus 4.5 there. No
| wonder Claude Code needs those harness features for the
| user to manually reign in control over its instruction
| following capability.
| andai wrote:
| I have only compared Claude Code with Crush and a tool of my
| own design. In my experience, Claude code is optimized for
| giant codebases and long tasks. It loves launching dozens of
| agents in parallel. So it's a bit heavy for smaller, surgical
| stuff, though it works decent for that too.
|
| If you mostly have small codebases that fit in context, or
| make many small changes interactively, it's not really great
| for that (though it can handle it too). It'll just be
| spending most of its time poking around the codebase, when
| the whole thing should have just been loaded... (Too bad
| there's no small repo mode. I made startup hook that just
| dumps cat dir into context, but yeah, should be a toggle.)
| afro88 wrote:
| You're not missing much. You can generally use Cursor like
| Claude Code for normal day to day use. I prefer Cursor
| because I like reviewing changes in an IDE, and I like being
| able to switch to the current SOTA model.
|
| Though for more automated work, one thing you miss with
| Cursor is sub agents. And then to a lesser extent skills
| (these are pretty easy to emulate in other tools). I'm sure
| it's only a matter of time though.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| Claude Code's VS Code integration is very easy to set up
| and pretty helpful if you want to see/review changes in an
| IDE.
| ollysb wrote:
| The big limitation is that you have to approve/disapprove
| at every step. With Cursor you can iterate on changes and
| it updates the diffs until you approve the whole batch.
| fzzzy wrote:
| There is an auto accept diffs mode
| ramoz wrote:
| You are missing an entire agentic experience. And I wouldn't
| call it vibe coding for an engineer; you're more or less
| empowered to truly orchestrate the development of your
| system.
|
| Cursor has agent, but that's like whoever else tried to copy
| the Model T while Ford was developing it.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| This hasn't been my experience at all. I'm finding Cursor
| with Opus 4.5 and plan mode to be just as capable as CC.
| And I prefer the UI/UX.
| andai wrote:
| I first got into agentic properly with GLM coding plan (it's
| like _$2 /month),_ but I found myself very consistently asking
| Claude to make the code more elegant and readable. At which
| point I realized I was being silly and just switched to Claude
| code.
|
| (GLM etc. get surprisingly close with good prompting but...
| $0.60/day to not worry about that is a no brainer.)
| Daniel_sk wrote:
| I don't even see much reason to use Cursor. I am used to
| IntelliJ IDEA, so I just downloaded the Claude Code plugin and
| basically now I use the IDE only for navigating in the code,
| finding references and reviewing the code. I can't even
| remember the last time I wrote more than 2 lines of code.
| Claude Code has catapulted my performance at least 5x if not
| more. And now that the cost of writing test is so minimal I am
| also able to achieve much better (and meaningful!) test
| coverage too. The AI agents is where the most productivity is.
| I just create a plan with Claude, iterate over, ask questions,
| then let it implement the plan, review, ask to do some
| adjustments. No manual writing of code at all. Zero.
| esafak wrote:
| IntelliJ has its own Claude integration too, but it does not
| use your Claude subscription:
| https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2025/09/introducing-claude-
| age...
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Maybe I'm holding it wrong, but the finer aspects of a
| codebase it still messes up. If I ask it to implement some
| weird thing off the beaten path it gets lost. But I
| completely agree at the test part. I actually test much more
| now since it's so easy!
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Nano Banana Pro is legitimately an insane tool if you know how
| to use it. I still can't believe they released it in the wild
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| It's decent for things that would take a long time in
| Photoshop. Like most AI, sometimes it works great and
| sometimes it goes off the rails completely. Most recently, I
| used it to process some drone photos that were taken during
| late fall for the purpose of marketing a commercial property.
| All of the trees/grass/plants were brown, so I told it to
| make it look like the photos were taken during the summer but
| not to change anything else. It did a very good job, not just
| changing the color, but actually adding leaves to the plants
| and trees in a way that looked very realistic. It did in
| seconds what would have taken one of my team members hours,
| leaving them to work on other more pressing projects.
| rolymath wrote:
| What is there to using it more than asking it to generate an
| image of something?
| kakapo5672 wrote:
| For one: modifying existing images in interesting ways ...
| adding characters, removing elements, altering or enhancing
| certain features, creating layers, and so on. Things that
| would take a while on Photoshop, done almost instantly.
| Really unlocks the imagination.
| dgacmu wrote:
| For me: I've only tried using it seriously a few times but
| my experience is that you have to juggle carefully when to
| start a fresh session. It can get really anchored on
| earlier versions of images. It was interesting balancing
| iteration and from-scratch prompt refinement.
| disease wrote:
| I gave it an image of my crappy art and asked what steps I
| could take to make it look better. It gave me specific
| advice like varying the line widths and how to use this on
| specific parts of the character. It also pointed out that
| the shading in my piece was inconsistent and did not
| reflect the 3d form I was representing and again gave me
| specific fixes I could implement. I asked for it to give me
| an updated version of the piece with all of its advice
| implemented and it did so. I was pretty shocked at all of
| this.
| yread wrote:
| Do you guys all work 100% on open source? Or are you uploading
| bits of your copyrighted code for future training to Anthropic?
| I hate patents so copyright is the only IP protection I have.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| We use AWS Bedrock, so everything stays within our AWS
| account. It's not like we aren't already uploading our code
| to GitHub for version control, AWS for deployment, Jetbrains
| for development, all of ours logs to Datadog, Sentry,
| Snowflake, and more.
| yread wrote:
| Yeah, my source code is on my computers, in self-hosted
| version control and self-hosted CI runners
| thefourthchime wrote:
| I've used all of these tools and for me Cursor works just as
| well but has tabs, easy ways to abort or edit prompts, great
| visual diff, etc...
|
| Someone sell me on how Claude Code, I just don't get it.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| I'm with you, I've used CC but I strongly prefer Cursor.
|
| Fundamentally, I don't like having my agent and my IDE be
| split. Yes, I know there are CC plugins for IDEs, but you
| don't get the same level of tight integration.
| augment_me wrote:
| I noticed that despite really liking Karpathy and the blog, I was
| am kind of wincing/involuntarily reacting to the LLM-like "It's
| not X, its Y"-phrases:
|
| > it's not just a website you go to like Google, it's a little
| spirit/ghost that "lives" on your computer
|
| > it's not just about the image generation itself, it's about the
| joint capability coming from text generation
|
| There would be no reaction from me on this 3 years ago, but now
| this sentence structure is ruined for me
| huevosabio wrote:
| Same, I cringe when I read this structure.
| d-lisp wrote:
| I hated these sentences way before LLMs, at least in the
| context of an explanation.
|
| > it's not just a website you go like Google, it's a little
| spirit/ghost that "lives" on your computer
|
| This type of sentence, I call rhetorical fat. Get rid of this
| fat and you obtain a boring sentence that repeats what has been
| said in the previous one.
|
| Not all rhetorical fats are equal, and I must admit I find
| myself eyerolling on the "little spirit" part more than about
| the fatness.
|
| I understand the author wants to decorate things and emphasize
| key elements, and the hate I feel is only caused by the
| incompatible projection of my ideals to a text that doesn't
| belong to me.
|
| > it's not just about the image generation itself, it's about
| the joint capability coming from text generation.
|
| That's unjustified conceptual stress.
|
| That could be a legitimate answer to a question ("No, no, it's
| not just about that, it's more about this"), but it's a text.
| Maybe the text wants you to be focused, maybe the text wants to
| hype you; this is the shape of the hype without the hype.
|
| "I find image generation is cooler when paired with text
| generation."
| killerstorm wrote:
| It is not a decoration. Karpathy juxtaposes ChatGPT (which
| feels like a "better google" to most people) to Claude Code,
| which, apparently, feels different to him. It's a comparison
| between the two.
|
| You might find this statement non-informative, but without
| two parts there's no comparison. That's really the semantics
| of the statement which Karpathy is trying to express.
|
| ChatGPT-ish "it's not just" is annoying because the first
| part is usually a strawman, something reader considers trite.
| But it's not the case here.
| d-lisp wrote:
| Indeed, I was probably grumpy at the time I wrote the
| comment. I do find some truth in it still.
|
| You're right ! The strawman theory is based.
|
| But I think there's more to it, I find dislikable the
| structure of these sentences (which I find a bit
| sensationnalist for nothing, I don't know, maybe I am still
| grumpy).
| killerstorm wrote:
| Well, language is a subject to 'fashion' one-upmanship
| game: people want to demonstrate their sophistication,
| often by copying some "cool" patterns, but then over-used
| patterns become "uncool" cliche.
|
| So it might be just a natural reaction to over-use of a
| particular pattern. This kind of stuff have been driving
| language evolution for millennia. Besides that, pompous
| style is often used in 'copy' (slogans and ads) which is
| something most people don't like.
| amelius wrote:
| Karpathy should go back to what he does best: educating
| people about AI on a deep level. Running experiments and
| sharing how they work, that sort of stuff. It seems lately he
| is closer to an influencer who reviews AI-based products.
| Hopefully it is not too late to go back.
| flakiness wrote:
| I feel these review stuff is more like a side / pass time
| to him. Look at nanochat for example. My impression is that
| these are the thongs he spends most of his energy still.
|
| After all,l he's been a "influencer" for a long time,
| starting from the "software 2.0" essay.
| another_twist wrote:
| Same here, had to configure ChatGPT to stop making these
| statements. Also had to configure bunch of other stuff to make
| it bland when answering questions.
| andai wrote:
| The way to make AI not sound like ChatGPT is to use Claude.
|
| I realized that's what bothered me. It's not "oh my god, they
| used ChatGPT." But "oh my god, they couldn't even be bothered
| to use Claude."
|
| It'll still sound like AI, but 90% of the cringe is gone.
|
| If you're going to use AI for writing, it's just basic
| decency to use the one that isn't going to make your audience
| fly into a fit of rage every ten seconds.
|
| That being said, I feel very self conscious using emdashes in
| current decade ;)
| ionwake wrote:
| I dont think Ive ever noticed someone use an emdash until
| chatgpt appeared
| andai wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/3126/
|
| I mostly use them in Telegram because it auto converts --
| into emdash. They are a pain to type everywhere else
| though!
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I love em dashes--they basically indicate a more deliberate
| pause than a ... without the tight vibes of a semicolon.
| another_twist wrote:
| I don't use LLM for writing just factual research stuff.
| And this would happen even in those questions.
| sungho_ wrote:
| If a reader gets angry simply because the author used
| ChatGPT instead of Claude, then the reader is an idiot.
| nathias wrote:
| It's not text - it's clickbait distillied to grammar.
| yard2010 wrote:
| I cannot unsee this anymore and it ruins the whole internet
| experience for me
| matsemann wrote:
| Yeah, came to read Karpathy's thoughts, but might as well ask
| an LLM myself..
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I used to use a lot of em dashes normally in my writing - they
| were my go-to replacements for commas and semicolons
|
| But I had to change how I write because people started calling
| my writing "AI generated"
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| 2026 will be the year of the ;
| vatsachak wrote:
| Please no that's my go to
| fzzzy wrote:
| so you switched to using hyphens instead?
| nicwolff wrote:
| En dashes!
| karpathy wrote:
| You're absolutely right!
|
| Jk jk, now that you pointed it out I can't unsee it.
| kakapo5672 wrote:
| Very broadly, AI sentence-structure and word choice is
| recursing back into society, changing how humans use language.
| The Economist recently had a piece on word usage of British
| Parliament members. They are adopting words and phrases
| commonly seen in AI.
|
| We're embarking on a ginormous planetary experiment here.
| nkko wrote:
| Beyond graduating students, I see model labs as
| "accelerators/incubators" bundling, launching, and productizing
| observed ideas that gain traction. The sheer strength of their
| platforms, the number of eyes watching them, near-zero marginal
| costs, and seemingly unlimited budgets mean that only slow
| decision-making can prevent them from becoming the next Amazons
| of everything.
| alexgotoi wrote:
| LLMs still need to bring clear added value to enterprise and
| corporate work; otherwise, they remain a geek's toy.
|
| Big media agencies that claim to use AI rely on strong creative
| teams who fine-tune prompts and spend weeks doing so. Even then,
| they don't fully trust AI to slice long videos into shorter clips
| for social media.
|
| Heavy administrative functions like HR or Finance still don't get
| approval to expose any of their data to LLMs.
|
| What I'm trying to say is that we are still in the early stages
| of LLM development, and as promising as this looks, it's still
| far from delivering the real value that is often claimed.
| gessha wrote:
| I think their non-deterministic nature is what's making it
| difficult to adopt. It's hard to train somebody in the old way
| of "if you see this, do this" because when you call the LLM
| twice you most likely get different results.
|
| It took a long time to computerize businesses and it might take
| some time to adopt/adapt to LLMs.
| dandelionv1bes wrote:
| Something I've been thinking about is how as end stage users (eg
| building our own "thing" on top of an LLM) we can broadly verify
| it's doing what we need without benchmarks. Does a set of custom
| evals built out over time solve this? Is there more we can do?
| andai wrote:
| The bit about o3 being the turning point is very interesting. I
| heard someone say that o3 (or perhaps the cheaper o4-mini) should
| have been called gpt-5, and that people would have been mind
| blown. Instead it kind of went under the radar as far as the
| mainstream goes.
|
| Whereas we just got the incremental progress with gpt-5 instead
| and it was very underwhelming. (Plus like 5 other issues at
| launch, but that's a separate story ;)
|
| I'm not sure if o4-mini would have made a good default gpt
| though. (Most use is conversational and its language is very
| awkward.) So they could have just called it gpt-5 pro or
| something, and put it on the $20 tier. I don't know.
| karpathy wrote:
| I agree with this fwiw, for many months I talked to people who
| never used o3 and didn't know what it was because it sounded
| weird. Maybe it wasn't obvious at the time but that was a good
| major point release to make then.
| andai wrote:
| Here's the source for the jagged spiky intelligence diagram:
|
| https://x.com/colin_fraser/status/1994235521812328695
|
| https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/the-space-of-minds/
| distalx wrote:
| Friendly reminder: There is no ghost in the machine. It is a
| system executing code, not a being having thoughts. Let's admire
| the tool without projecting a personality onto it.
| ngruhn wrote:
| Consciousness is weird and nobody understands it. There is no
| good reason to assume that these systems have it. But there is
| also no good reason to rule it out.
| squidbeak wrote:
| You sound as if you have grounds for certainty about this. What
| are they?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| That's the old way of thinking about it. there is a new way.
| skybrian wrote:
| For me, that's kind of the point. It's similar to how the
| characters in a novel don't really exist, and yet you can't
| really discuss what happens in a novel without pretending that
| they do. It doesn't really make sense to treat the author's
| motivations and each character's motivations as the same.
|
| Similarly, we're all talking to ghosts now, which aren't real,
| and yet there is something there that we can talk about. There
| are obvious behavioral differences depending on what persona
| the LLM is generating text for.
|
| I also like the hint of danger in "talking to ghosts." It's
| difficult to see how a rational adult could be in any danger
| from just talking, but I believe the news reports that some
| people who get too deep into it get "possessed."
| lysecret wrote:
| It's funny how every podcaster/public ai figure is so certain
| text as a Ui will go away and it's not going anywhere.
| tim333 wrote:
| It's probably increased during my lifetime. People used to
| talk, now they sit and text into smartphones.
| gessha wrote:
| There might be some confusion about the transition to what
| some call post-literate era: era where text is not the
| primary medium. That's not necessarily bad because you get
| the advantages of other mediums - oral and visual but it is
| something to keep in mind.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm bit skeptical that a post-literate era is happening. I
| gather it appears in some sci-fi but I don't see much sign
| in reality. I mean here we are on a text only site. If
| anything we seem to be heading for a 100% literate society.
| Literacy graphs here:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-
| ra...
| gessha wrote:
| I don't think the post-illiterate era means that text
| will disappear. I think it's just not going to be
| dominant anymore but I also have my reservations since I
| do prefer the text medium.
| devalexwells wrote:
| A few days ago I was trying to unsubscribe to a service
| (notably an AI 3D modeling tool that I was curious about).
|
| I spent 5 minutes trying to find a way to unsubscribe and
| couldn't. Finally, I found it buried in the plan page as one of
| those low-contrast ellipses on the plan card.
|
| Instead of unsubscribing me or taking me to a form, it opened a
| convos with an AI chatbot with a preconfigured "unsubscribe"
| prompt. I have never felt more angry with a UI that I had to
| waste more time talking to a robot before it would render the
| unsubscribe button in the chat.
|
| Why would we bring the most hated feature of automated phone
| calls to apps? As a frontend engineer I am horrified by these
| trends.
| metalman wrote:
| find on page:slop=0
| cheesecompiler wrote:
| Excellent more grounded review. A few questions:
|
| > LLMs are emerging as a new kind of intelligence, simultaneously
| a lot smarter than I expected and a lot dumber than I expected
|
| Isn't this concerning? How can we know which one we get? In the
| realm of code it's easier to tell when mistakes are being made.
|
| > regular people benefit a lot more from LLMs compared to
| professionals, corporations and governments
|
| We thought this would happen with things like AppleScript, VB,
| visual programming. But instead, AI is currently used as a
| smarter search engine. The issue is that's also the area where it
| hallucinates the most. What do you think is the solution?
| sireat wrote:
| What is current state of the art workflow when working with
| legacy code across multiple languages?
|
| This would be a 100 kLOC legacy project written in C++, Python,
| and jQuery era Javascript circa 2010. Original devs have long
| left. I would rather avoid C++ as much as possible.
|
| I've been Github Copilot (in VS Code) user since June of 2021 and
| still use it heavily, but the "more powerful intellisence"
| approach is limiting me on legacy projects.
|
| Presumably I need to provide more context on larger projects.
|
| I can get pretty far with just ChatGPT plus and feeding bits and
| pieces of project. However that seems like using the wrong tool.
|
| Codex seems better for building things but not sure about
| grokking existing things.
|
| Would Cursor be more suitable for just dumping the whole project
| (all languages) basically 4 different sub projects and then
| selectively activating what to include in queries?
| sandos wrote:
| I dont understand, the agent mode of copilot will search for
| and be pretty good and filling its own context afaik. I never
| really feed any of our 100k+ lines legacy codebase explicitly
| to the LLM.
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