Karpathy got sick of YouTube on a Friday night, handed it to Opus 5.5, and had 'HackerTube' with 6,454 videos in about two hours

AI researcher Andrej Karpathy got fed up with YouTube's recommendations and told Anthropic's Opus 5.5 to build a YouTube of its own from videos recommended on Hacker News. About two hours later he had launched HackerTube.

In a post on his blog dated Oct. 31 (US time), Karpathy wrote that at 11 p.m. on Friday he opened YouTube, tired, and saw "an enshittified wall of slop" of exaggerated thumbnails and the same tired topics. On Saturday morning he gave Opus the task. Opus downloaded every Hacker News comment, filtered them, ran Sonnet over them in a Claude Code Workflow to remove spam, and narrowed everything to 40,000 comments recommending a video. That produced 6,454 videos recommended on HN from 2007 to 2026, grouped into 150 topics.

The site uses the frame from the 50% mark instead of the uploaded thumbnail and gives personalized recommendations with no account, keeping state in the browser session. It has keyboard shortcuts and a data export that lets you hand the site's data to your own agent to build a version of it.

In an edit, Karpathy described his process: he uses Claude Code (the Mac desktop app) with Opus 5.5 on Medium effort as his default. "I don't actually do anything resembling traditional engineering anymore (read/write code, run commands in a terminal)," he wrote; he only talks to Claude. His only manual work was creating a Google Cloud API key to query YouTube, booting a VPS and buying the domain. Once the box was up he gave Claude the IP and asked it to deploy, secure, harden and optimize.

Developer Yuchen Jin's post summarizing the setup drew more than 2,200 likes. He argued that the terminal is the wrong interface for coding agents and that desktop apps are the best today. One reply pointed out that the same paragraph says Karpathy no longer reads code, so of course he doesn't need a terminal.