OpenAI Co-Founder Andrej Karpathy Builds Video Site HackerTube in Two Hours Using AI
Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who joined Anthropic in May, unveiled HackerTube on October 31st, a video website he built in approximately two hours using Anthropic’s Claude Code. The site features 6,454 YouTube videos, all of which were previously recommended by users in comments on Hacker News over the past two decades. Karpathy stated that his only manual contributions were applying for an API key, setting up a server, and purchasing a domain name.
Background: A Frustration with YouTube’s Algorithm
The genesis of HackerTube, as detailed in Karpathy’s blog, stemmed from a late-night YouTube browsing session on a Friday. He found the platform’s algorithm serving him exaggerated thumbnails and predictable content, which he described as “definitely does not work for me.”
The following Saturday morning, Karpathy tasked Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 model with the challenge of creating his own YouTube, curated from videos recommended on Hacker News.
The AI-Powered Curation Process
Karpathy explained in an X post that Claude processed 43 million comments from Hacker News over 20 years, distilling them down to 6,454 frequently recommended videos. His blog elaborated on the process: Opus first downloaded all Hacker News comments and filtered them. Then, using Claude Code’s Workflow feature, the Sonnet model analyzed these comments to remove spam.
This rigorous filtering left approximately 40,000 comments recommending YouTube videos. The HackerTube site’s statistics confirm 39,834 such comments from 15,041 unique users, indicating that less than one in every thousand Hacker News comments contained a video recommendation.
The curated videos span from 2007 to 2026 and are categorized into 150 themes. While the blog describes them as videos “recommended by a few people on HN,” the website’s homepage states they are “YouTube videos that Hacker News users repeatedly recommended to each other.”
A Familiar Interface, a Different Approach
HackerTube’s interface closely mimics YouTube’s. However, instead of user-uploaded thumbnails, the site uses mid-video frames. Karpathy humorously described user-uploaded thumbnails as “super duper A/B test hyper-optimized user uploads.”
The recommendation feature requires no account registration, and viewing history is stored locally in the user’s browser. The site also supports keyboard shortcuts and makes the analyzed comment data available as a downloadable 17.8 MB compressed file. Karpathy encouraged readers to use this data with their own Claude instances to create their personalized versions.
A Significantly Improved Viewing Experience
Karpathy lauded the result as a “Significantly better viewing experience.” He concluded his blog post with: “This takes ~2 hours now. I can breathe again.”
He further elaborated that he used the Mac version of the Claude Code desktop app, with Opus 5.5 set to medium inference effort. “I’m not really doing any traditional engineering anymore (writing code, running commands in the terminal, etc.), I’m just talking to Claude and having it do all the work,” he wrote.
His manual tasks were limited to three: applying for an API key on Google Cloud to query YouTube for video data, setting up a VPS (Virtual Private Server), and purchasing a domain name. Once the server was ready, he provided its IP address to Claude, instructing it to update and deploy the code, as well as implement security and performance optimizations.
Karpathy noted in his X post that projects that would have previously taken weeks or months can “now be few-shotted for breakfast.” His post, shared on November 1st at 2:14 AM Taiwan time, had garnered approximately 2.4 million views and 32,000 likes by the morning of November 2nd.
His own blog post about HackerTube, submitted to Hacker News, had received 2,332 points and 542 comments. Separately, on the night of November 1st, another user named roansh launched “HackerBooks,” a collection of books mentioned on Hacker News, which received 997 points on the Show HN section.
What is HackerTube?
HackerTube is a video website created by Andrej Karpathy using Claude Code. It hosts 6,454 YouTube videos recommended by Hacker News users, organized into 150 themes, and does not require account registration.
How Andrej Karpathy Selected Videos from Hacker News Comments
According to his blog, Opus first downloaded and filtered all Hacker News comments. Then, the Sonnet model analyzed the comments to remove spam, leaving approximately 40,000 comments that recommended YouTube videos, which were then compiled into 6,454 videos.
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