Andrej Karpathy, one of the founders of OpenAI and the former head of artificial intelligence at Tesla, became frustrated with YouTube on Friday evening. By the next morning, he had already finished his own alternative. The HackerTube website offers more than 6,400 videos, and instead of relying on an algorithm chasing views, it is based on recommendations from readers of the Hacker News technology forum. Artificial intelligence built the entire project for him, while he merely assigned tasks.
It was eleven o’clock at night, Karpathy was tired and wanted to watch an interesting video. Instead, as he wrote on his blog, he was met with a wall full of junk. He was bothered by exaggerated thumbnails, foolish recommendations of overused topics, and content whose quality he compared to the film Idiocracy. He admitted that the platform’s algorithm probably works well for the average user, but certainly not for him.
Instead of more aimless scrolling, he decided to solve the problem his own way. On Saturday morning, he opened the Claude Code app, selected Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 model, and gave it a simple assignment. He wanted them to build their own clone of a video platform based on links recommended on Hacker News.
Human curation instead of an algorithm
Opus got to work. It downloaded the complete archive of comments from Hacker News, sorted through them, and then used the Workflow feature to deploy the smaller Claude Sonnet model on them. It removed spam and extracted roughly 40,000 comments from the flood of discussions in which someone recommended a specific YouTube video.
The result is a catalog of 6,454 videos that were recommended by multiple Hacker News commenters. They cover the period from 2007 through this year and are divided into 150 topics. Lectures, conference recordings, and detailed technical analyses predominate—exactly the kind of content the Hacker News community appreciates and that YouTube’s algorithm instead buries somewhere deep.
The model then wrapped the entire collection in an interface resembling YouTube. Next came the domain, deployment to a virtual server, security, and performance tuning. The website runs at hackertube.org and differs from YouTube in several small ways that make a big difference. For videos, it does not display thumbnails uploaded by their creators, but rather a frame from the middle of the video. This eliminates the exaggerated facial expressions and garish captions whose sole purpose is to attract clicks.
HackerTube also offers its own recommendations in the “For You” section, without any user accounts. Everything it needs to know about a viewer is stored only in their browser. It also includes keyboard shortcuts, and the entire website’s data is available for download. Anyone can therefore give it to their own AI agent and have it build a custom version.
According to Karpathy, the entire process took roughly two hours. “I can breathe again. Thank you, Opus 5.5,” he added at the end of his post.
Weekend hack: HackerTube. I was annoyed with YouTube's recommendations so I had Claude filter down 43M comments over 20 years of HN to 6,454 videos that keep being recommended. *Significantly* better viewing experience, ~2 hours with Opus 5.5: https://t.co/JIhXN7OSh1 - Excellent recs without any logins (state is kept in local browser session) - Thumbnail is a representative frame from middle of the video instead of the super duper A/B test hyper-optimized user uploads - Underlying data from the comment analysis as one zip file, point your Claude at it and ask for your own version - HackerTube Longs ✊ A bit more on the process: I use Claude Code (desktop app for Mac), Opus 5.5 on Medium effort as my default. I only talk to Claude and have it do everything, the only "manual work" I helped with in tandem was in the browser (reminiscent of MenuGen): 1) I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata, 2) I booted up a VPS box for serving and 3) I bought the domain name. Once the box was up I gave Claude the IP and told it update, secure, harden, deploy and optimize the code, and it did the whole thing. Many awesome projects that would have normally taken weeks/months even can now be few-shotted for breakfast. What else are we not thinking of.
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) November 1, 2026
A programmer who no longer programs
However, far more attention than the website itself was drawn by an addendum in which Karpathy described his current working style. He uses the Claude Code desktop app on a Mac and has the Opus 5.5 model set to medium effort by default. He wrote that he no longer does anything resembling traditional software development. He neither reads nor writes code, and he does not run commands in the terminal. He simply communicates with Claude and leaves everything to it.
His manual work on the HackerTube project was reduced to three tasks. In Google Cloud, he created a key through which the website retrieves information about videos from YouTube, launched a virtual server, and bought a domain. He completed everything while Claude was working on its tasks, so in his words, it still felt a little like teamwork. Once the server was running, he gave Claude the IP address and had it deploy, secure, and optimize the code. The model handled it entirely on its own.
A demonstration, or a sign of things to come?
Karpathy’s experiment can be viewed in two ways. Skeptics point out that a personal video collection is more a demonstration of what is possible than an actual product. Moreover, the tastes of the Hacker News community represent a specific information bubble that is only slightly more sophisticated than YouTube’s.
The second perspective, however, is more consequential. When someone who led artificial intelligence development at Tesla openly says that he no longer programs, the very concept of creating software begins to change. The technology website AI Blitz described it as not faster programming, but an entirely different activity. According to the site, the obstacle is no longer building the project itself, but deciding what should be created in the first place.
Karpathy himself takes the situation in stride. On X, he called the project a weekend hack and added that things that once would have taken weeks or months can now be created much faster with the help of artificial intelligence.
