Karpathy ships HackerTube in ~2 hours with Claude Opus 5.5

Andrej Karpathy published HackerTube on October 31, a YouTube alternative seeded with 6,454 videos lifted from Hacker News comments between 2007 and 2026, spanning 150 topics. He says it took about two hours.

The origin is a late-night complaint. "It was Friday night at 11pm, I was tired, I went to YouTube to watch something and realized that I was looking at an enshittified wall of slop," Karpathy writes, before pitching himself the project: "Let's write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News."

The pipeline is deliberately bare. In his words, "Opus downloaded all comments of HackerNews, filtered them, ran Sonnet over them in a Workflow (Claude Code feature), got rid of spam, and narrowed everything down to 40K comments recommending a YouTube video." Claude Opus 5.5 drove the build; Claude Sonnet handled the filtering pass; the output is 6,454 videos pulled with YouTube's own metadata API.

The more striking line is about process. "I don't actually _do_ anything resembling traditional engineering anymore (read/write code, run commands in a terminal, or etc.), I only talk to Claude and have it do everything," he writes. The three jobs he still did by hand were creating a Google Cloud API key, booting a VPS, and buying the domain.

Anthropic's Claude Code is already the heaviest-covered coding tool on our tracker, with 124 stories on coding tools in the last 90 days alongside 359 Anthropic stories in the same window; Karpathy's post is less a product than a public datapoint for what one of the field's loudest practitioners now considers normal.

"This takes ~2 hours now," he writes.