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Over the weekend, Andrej Karpathy used Claude Code together with Opus 5.5 to build the video site HackerTube in about two hours. According to a report by A Yi AI Notes, he filtered roughly 43 million Hacker News comments from the past twenty years down to 6,454 frequently recommended long videos; the site requires no login, uses a middle frame of each video as its thumbnail, and stores browsing state in the local browser session. He himself only manually applied for a Google Cloud YouTube API key, rented a VPS and bought a domain, then handed the IP over to Claude, which completed the deployment, security hardening and code optimization. A follow-up report by 36Kr · AI added that he used the desktop version of Claude Code with Opus 5.5 at Medium reasoning effort, that the page layout replicates YouTube, and that the underlying data can be exported and handed to one's own AI agent to rebuild a version. There is currently no further public progress on this matter.
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Karpathy builds HackerTube with Claude Opus 5.5 in two hours
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36Kr · AI
Karpathy Built the HackerTube Video Site with Claude Code in Two Hours
Karpathy used the Claude Code desktop app with Opus 5.5 at Medium reasoning effort to build HackerTube in two hours; the page layout replicates YouTube, the videos come from YouTube, and the filtering rules are drawn from videos recommended on Hacker News over the years, 6,454 in total. He personally did only three things: create a Google Cloud API key, start a VPS, and buy a domain; coding, data processing, deployment, and security hardening were all left to Claude. The site does not require login, watch status is stored in the local browser, thumbnails are taken from a middle frame of the video, and the underlying data can be exported to one's own AI agent to remake a version.
36Kr · AI
Karpathy built HackerTube with Claude in two hours, featuring only videos recommended on Hacker News
Karpathy had Claude sift through 43 million comments from nearly 20 years of Hacker News to extract nearly 40,000 comments recommending YouTube videos, organizing them into 6,454 videos across 150 topics, and launched a YouTube-like site called HackerTube within two hours. Throughout the process he did not read or write any code, only handling server setup and domain purchase; Opus 5.5 oversaw the work, Sonnet batch-screened comments, and deployment and security hardening were also completed by Claude. He disclosed that over 90% of model usage went to comment annotation, app development and deployment used about 1 million Opus tokens, and the comment analysis data has been packaged and released publicly.
Nov 2
cnBeta
Karpathy builds HackerTube video recommendation site with Claude Code in two hours
Karpathy built the video recommendation website HackerTube in about two hours using Claude Code and Claude Opus 5.5, using Claude to analyze 43 million Hacker News comments from the past 20 years and filter out 6,454 videos that were consistently recommended. The site requires no registration or login, uses a mid-video frame rather than the creator's thumbnail for thumbnails, and publicly releases a ZIP package of the comment analysis data for others to adapt themselves. He said he only manually created the Google Cloud API key, started the VPS, and purchased the domain, while Claude completed the rest of the code, deployment, and security hardening.
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Numerama
Karpathy Built HackerTube with Claude Code in Two Hours, Featuring Only Videos Recommended on Hacker News
Andrej Karpathy has launched HackerTube, a YouTube alternative that only features videos recommended by the Hacker News community, developed and deployed by Claude in about two hours. Claude processed 43 million comments from Hacker News spanning twenty years, filtered out roughly 40,000 comments that explicitly recommended videos, and ultimately arrived at 6,454 videos from 2007 to 2026, sorted into 150 topics. Karpathy says he did not write a single line of code, only manually creating Google Cloud API keys, renting a server and buying a domain, using Claude Code for Mac with Opus 5.5 at the medium effort setting; he also released the analysis data, and others have already used it to build an arXiv version and an Android app.
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Phoenix Technology
Karpathy Built the HackerTube Video Recommendation Website with Claude Code in Two Hours
Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI director and OpenAI co-founding member, released a weekend project called HackerTube. Dissatisfied with YouTube's recommendation mechanism, he used Anthropic's Claude Code to filter 6,454 repeatedly recommended videos from 43 million Hacker News comments spanning the past 20 years, and built a new video recommendation website. The whole process took about 2 hours. The project used the Claude Opus 5.5 model with reasoning effort set to Medium. Karpathy said he personally completed only three operations: creating a Google Cloud API key, starting a VPS server, and purchasing a domain name; the rest of the development, deployment, and security hardening was done by Claude. The website requires no registration or login, uses thumbnails taken from the middle of videos rather than creator covers, and provides a ZIP archive of the underlying comment analysis data for other developers to adapt on their own.
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Ayi AI Notes
Karpathy built the HackerTube video site with Claude Opus 5.5 in two hours
Over the weekend, Karpathy used Claude Code together with Opus 5.5 to filter 43 million comments spanning 20 years of Hacker News down to 6,454 frequently recommended long videos, and built HackerTube, which requires no login, in about two hours. The site's cover images are taken directly from the middle frame of each video rather than the optimized thumbnails uploaded by creators, and browsing state is kept in the local browser session. He only manually applied for a YouTube API key from Google Cloud, rented a VPS, and bought a domain in the browser; after that he handed the IP to Claude and let it handle deployment, security hardening, and code optimization.
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Karpathy built HackerTube with Claude, filtering 6,454 recommended videos from 43 million HN comments
Andrej Karpathy built the weekend project HackerTube with Claude Code and Opus 5.5, filtering 6,454 consistently recommended videos from 43 million comments across 20 years of HN, taking about 2 hours. The site requires no login, keeps state in the local browser session, and uses a representative frame from the middle of each video as the thumbnail. He said that aside from applying for a Google Cloud API key, setting up a VPS, and buying a domain, all other updates, hardening, deployment, and optimization were left to Claude, and the comment analysis data was packaged into a zip file so Claude could use it to generate its own version.
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Rohan Paul
Karpathy builds HackerTube with Claude Opus 5.5 in two hours
Karpathy used Claude Code with Opus 5.5 (Medium effort) to build HackerTube in about two hours: he had Claude filter 43 million comments from 20 years of Hacker News down to 6,454 repeatedly recommended videos, and built and launched a browsing website. He said he only conversed with Claude throughout the process; the only manual parts were creating an API key on Google Cloud, starting a VPS, and purchasing a domain, after which he handed the IP to Claude to complete updates, hardening, deployment, and optimization. He also packaged the comment analysis data into a zip file so others can have Claude generate their own version.
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Andrej Karpathy
Karpathy built HackerTube with Claude, filtering 6,454 videos from 43 million HN comments
Karpathy released the weekend project HackerTube, using Claude to filter 6,454 repeatedly recommended videos from 43 million comments spanning 20 years of HN. The entire project was completed in about 2 hours using Opus 5.5. The site provides recommendations without requiring login, thumbnails are taken from a representative frame in the middle of the video, and the comment analysis data is packaged as a zip file that can be handed to Claude to generate your own version. He used the Mac desktop version of Claude Code and manually did only three things: applying for a Google Cloud API key, starting a VPS, and purchasing a domain. After that, he had Claude handle updates, security hardening, deployment, and code optimization.
Nov 1
Shao Meng
Karpathy Built HackerTube in Two Hours with Claude Opus 5.5
Andrej Karpathy used Claude Opus 5.5 (Claude Code) to filter YouTube videos recommended over the past two decades from Hacker News comments and built HackerTube, a YouTube look-alike. About 40,000 recommendation comments were consolidated into 6,454 videos spanning 2007–2026 and covering 150 topics, all in roughly two hours. By hand, he did only three things: apply for a Google API key, spin up a VPS, and buy a domain; the rest was done by conversing with Claude. Once the VPS was up, he handed over the IP and let it update, deploy, harden, and optimize on its own. The site's thumbnails use the 50% progress frame, For You requires no login and stores state in the browser's local session, and the data can be exported for your own agent to make further variants.
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