AI programming · 2026-11-05

Karpathy built a YouTube-style site from Hacker News videos in two hours with Claude

Well-known AI expert Andrej Karpathy showed how AI can build a website in a few hours that used to take weeks.

✨ What happened

Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, created a site called HackerTube. It works like YouTube, but shows videos that Hacker News users have shared over the last 20 years. He announced the project in his account on X.

📌 How it was built

Karpathy used Claude Opus 5.5, a model from Anthropic. Claude filtered 43 million comments from Hacker News users and selected 6,454 recommended videos. This created an alternative to YouTube's recommendation algorithm, where videos are chosen based on what people actually recommended on Hacker News rather than popularity.

According to Karpathy, building the site took about two hours. He personally did only a few things: set up a Google Cloud API key, bought a domain, and rented a VPS (virtual server). Claude handled the rest, including coding, deployment, security, and optimization.

🔹 What makes the site different

HackerTube does not require login to watch videos. Instead of bright, exaggerated thumbnails often used for clickbait, the site uses frames taken directly from the videos. Users can also upload the basic recommendation data.

🔸 Why it matters

Karpathy argues that projects that once took weeks or months can now be built in a single morning. This approach, where a person describes what they need and AI writes the code, is called vibe coding. For an ordinary person without programming experience, this shows how creating digital services is changing. Still, launching such a site requires knowledge of domains, servers, and access keys, so doing it entirely without technical skills is still hard.

Sources: 🔗 DOU/dev.ua