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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

Hey, thank you for making this—I really enjoyed playing it and it feels like it fits the mental-reward-between-work-tasks need. It did spin up my M1's fans after a few minutes which is a rather rare occurrence, but I'm guessing that's par for the course when you're working with a bunch of video on canvas. Either way, hope I remember it the next time I'm looking for a puzzle to solve while I take a break :)

Just thought I'd add to this thread that I also had a lot of fun playing this game, and I don't normally enjoy puzzles on the computer!

A couple of very minor pieces of feedback, if you're open to it: The camera momentum when dragging felt a little unnatural. The videos seemed to have a slightly jumpy framerate and were a bit low-resolution when zoomed in.

Honestly though, those are minor nitpicks. It's a really fun and polished experience. Thanks for sharing!

>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.

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