Andrej Karpathy: evaluation

Transcript context

…You tweeted out that coding models were of very little help to you in assembling this repository. I’m curious why that was. I guess I built the repository over a period of a bit more than a month. I would say there are three major classes of how people interact with code right now. Some people completely reject all of LLMs and they are just writing by scratch. This is probably not the right thing to do anymore. The intermediate part, which is where I am, is you still write a lot of things from scratch, but you use the autocomplete that’s available now from these models. So when you start writing out a little piece of it, it will autocomplete for you and you can just tap through. Most of the time it’s correct, sometimes it’s not, and you edit it. But you’re still very much the architect of what you’re writing. Then there’s the vibe coding: “Hi, please implement this or that,” enter, and then let the model do it. That’s the agents. I do feel like the agents work in very specific settings, and I would use them in specific settings. But these are all tools available to you and you have to learn what they’re good at, what they’re not good at, and when to use them. So the agents are pretty good, for example, if you’re doing boilerplate stuff. Boilerplate code that’s just copy-paste stuff, they’re very good at that. They’re very good at stuff that occurs very often on the Internet because there are lots of examples of it in the training sets of these models. There are features of things where the models will do very well. I would say nanochat is not an example of those because it’s a fairly unique repository. There’s not that much code in the way that I’ve structured it. It’s not boilerplate code. It’s intellectually intense code almost, and everything has to be very precisely arranged. The models have so many cognitive deficits. One example, they kept misunderstanding the code because they have too much memory from all the typical ways of doing things on the Internet that I just wasn’t adopting. The models, for example—I don’t know if I want to get into the full details—but they kept thinking I’m writing normal code, and I’m not. Maybe one example?…

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