Andrej Karpathy Built HackerTube, a YouTube-like Service, in About 2 Hours
Andrej Karpathy used Claude to filter 43 million Hacker News comments into a YouTube-like recommendation service called HackerTube in roughly two hours.
Andrej Karpathy launched HackerTube, a YouTube-like service he built as an alternative to what he described as YouTube’s “garbage” recommendations.
He said he was annoyed by low-quality YouTube suggestions, so over the weekend he decided to vibe-code a new platform tailored to his own taste.
Karpathy tasked Claude with filtering 43 million Hacker News comments from the past 20 years down to 6,454 videos that are repeatedly recommended there.
The work took about two hours using Claude Opus 5.5 at Medium effort. Karpathy says he only handled a few manual steps himself: buying the domain, creating a YouTube API key, and setting up a VPS.
The result is a YouTube-like project built on two decades of Hacker News community recommendations.
He also published the analysis of those 43 million comments as a separate zip file, so users can ask their own AI agent to generate a feed tailored to their query.
“A lot of amazing projects that used to take weeks or months can now be done over breakfast. What else aren’t we thinking about yet?”
Why it matters
AnalysisThe project illustrates how AI coding agents can compress prototyping of complex services from weeks to hours while exposing recommendation datasets for user-controlled customization.
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