Comment by rootusrootus
7 hours ago
That is a good thing to hear from someone as reputable as Karpathy. The folks who think we're on the cusp of AGI may want to temper their expectations a bit.
I do love Claude Code, because one thing I periodically need to do is write some web code, which is not my favorite type of coding but happens to have incredibly good coverage in the training data. Claude is a much better web developer than I am.
But for digging into the algorithmic core of our automation tooling, it doesn't have nearly as much to work with and makes far more mistakes. Still a net win I'm happy to pay for, even if it's never anything more than my web developer slave.
100%. I find the "LLMs are completely useless" and the "LLMs will usher in a new era of messianic programming" camps to be rather reductive.
I've already built some pretty large projects [1] with the assistance of agentic tooling like Claude Code. When it comes to the more squirrely algorithms and logic, they can fall down pretty hard. But as somebody who is just dreadful at UI/UX, having it hammer out all the web dev scaffolding saves me a huge amount of time and stress.
It's just a matter of tempering one's expectations.
[1] https://animated-puzzles.specr.net
>and the "LLMs will usher in a new era of messianic programming" camps
Well, this one might still be borne out. It's just silly to think it's the case right now. Check in again in 10 years and it may be a very different story. Maybe even in 5 years.
What do we build now to reap the coming of the messianic era?
> But for digging into the algorithmic core of our automation tooling
What I find fascinating is reading this same thing in other context like “UI guru” will say “I would not let CC touch the UI but I let it rip on algorithmic core of our automation tooling cause it is better at it than me…”
Both can be true. LLMs tend to be mediocre at (almost) everything, so they're always going to be worse than the user at whatever the user is an expert in.
But 'mediocre' isn't 'useless'.
I completely agree. I'm definitely not an expert web developer. I know enough to build functional tools, but it's not exactly art that I'm making. But the core of our tooling is my primary focus, I wrote it, I've spent a lot of time perfecting it. Claude can easily impress me with things like the CSS magic it weaves, because I am unsophisticated.