Technology

Karpathy Launches HackerTube in Two Hours Using Claude, Rejecting YouTube’s Algorithm

By 深潮 TechFlow

On November 2, OpenAI co‑founder Andrej Karpathy announced that he had built the video site HackerTube in just two hours, using Claude to automate the entire process. Karpathy, frustrated with YouTube’s repetitive recommendations and clickbait thumbnails, chose to create a minimalist platform that draws from the Hacker News community. HackerTube hosts 6,454 high‑quality videos across 150 tech topics, all sourced from nearly two decades of discussions. Users can browse without logging in, and the site eliminates clickbait thumbnails by capturing a static frame from the center of each video.

The project relied on Claude’s ability to clean and semantically analyze about 43 million historical Hacker News comments. First, Claude performed a regex‑based cleanup, then the Sonnet model disambiguated the content, yielding roughly 40,000 valid recommendations. This dual‑model pipeline reduced what would normally take weeks of manual review to minutes.

Karpathy reported that he did not write any business code. The entire codebase, data pipelines, and deployment scripts were generated by Claude Code, with the Opus 5.5 model acting as system architect and DevOps engineer. Karpathy’s only manual tasks were obtaining API keys and purchasing a domain name.

The project consumed 504 million input tokens and 7.6 million output tokens, with over 90 % of the cost allocated to Sonnet for corpus classification. Opus 5.5 used about 1 million tokens for architecture and deployment. The resulting site is live, and the cleaned dataset has been open‑sourced.