Andrei Karpathy built a video service based on Hacker News in two hours using AI
Former AI director at Tesla and OpenAI co-founder Andrei Karpathy created HackerTube—a YouTube alternative with recommendations from the Hacker News community. The development, assisted by Claude Code, took about two hours.
The project idea emerged after yet another disappointment with YouTube’s recommendations. Karpathy decided to abandon the popular platform’s algorithms and instead rely on the collective choices of the Hacker News tech community.
To achieve this, Claude Code analyzed the Hacker News discussion archive, covering the period from 2007 to 2026. From approximately 40,000 comments mentioning YouTube, the system selected 6,454 videos across 150 thematic categories.
Using the collected database, Karpathy built HackerTube—a service with an interface resembling YouTube. It includes personalized recommendations, a 'For You' section, hotkey controls, and the ability to save preferences without registration. Instead of custom thumbnails, frames from the middle of the videos are used.
According to the developer, Claude Code handled the bulk of the work: from data processing and code writing to security setup and website deployment on the server. Karpathy himself only created an API key, launched the server, and registered the domain.
The entire experiment took about two hours. The developer views it as another example of how AI is transforming the software development process: instead of writing code directly, a person formulates tasks and manages the work of an AI assistant.
