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Karpathy thought YouTube recommendations were so poor that he had Claude 2 hours to build HackerTube

Dongcha Beating AI News: Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder and current member of Anthropic's pre-training team, had had enough of YouTube's repetitive recommendations and exaggerated thumbnails, so he simply had Claude build a video recommendation website, HackerTube, for him, taking only about 2 hours in total.

HackerTube includes 6454 YouTube videos across 150 topics. The videos are all drawn from recommendation records spanning nearly Hacker News years from the 20 technical community, rather than YouTube's own recommendation algorithm. The site requires no login and can be browsed immediately; personal browsing state is stored locally. Video thumbnails no longer use the exaggerated thumbnails uploaded by creators, instead uniformly capturing a frame from the middle of each video.

To find these videos,Claude processed Hacker News approximately 43000000 historical comments. It first narrowed the scope through methods such as link matching and regular expressions, then called Sonnet to identify comments that genuinely recommended videos and remove spam, ultimately compiling this set of videos from approximately 40000 valid comments.

The entire project was completed by Claude Code. Opus 5.5 handled the data-processing pipeline, website development, and deployment, while Sonnet handled large-scale comment classification. Karpathy said that he wrote no code by hand and did not operate the terminal; he only manually applied for YouTube API Key, purchased the domain name, started the server, and configured DNS. All remaining work, including server hardening and performance optimization, was delegated to Claude.

Karpathy disclosed that the project consumed a total of 504000000 input Token(approximately 90%cache hits) and 7600000 output Token. More than 90%of the usage was spent on Sonnet's classification of comments, while website development and deployment themselves consumed approximately 1000000 Opus 5.5 Token.

HackerTube is now live, and the compiled recommendation data is also available for download. Others can give the data to their own Agent to create video websites aligned with their personal interests.

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