Karpathy built a video site in one weekend with Claude's help

Andrej Karpathy built a working video website over a single weekend, with Claude doing nearly all the work. The site is called HackerTube. It holds 6,454 videos that readers of Hacker News, a long-running tech discussion forum, keep recommending. Karpathy is an OpenAI co-founder and is now an AI researcher at Anthropic.

How it worked

Claude, using its Opus 5.5 model, sorted through 43 million Hacker News comments from 20 years of posts. It pulled out the videos people kept pointing to. Karpathy says the result is a "significantly better viewing experience" than YouTube's own recommendations. That is his opinion, posted on X.

The site needs no login. It shows one frame from the middle of each video instead of a polished thumbnail. It saves your activity in your own browser.

Karpathy then built a second site, TristanTube, in 3 minutes. He describes it as "one-shotted" with Claude Code, meaning it came together in a single try. It has 47,000 videos from a YouTube channel list by Tristan Hume.

What is not clear

Karpathy says his only hands-on steps were getting a Google Cloud key, renting a server and buying the domain name. Claude Code handled the rest, from data analysis to server setup. He says projects that once took weeks can now take a few hours.

The comparison with YouTube has not been tested by anyone else. The material also does not say what the project cost to run or whether the sites will stay online.