TL;DR
What is HackerTube, and did Claude really build it?
AI researcher Andrej Karpathy built HackerTube, a YouTube-style site of 6,454 videos that Hacker News users kept recommending. He did it mostly by asking Claude to do the work. It shows how far one person can get with an AI coding agent in a morning. Try a small tool yourself, but expect it to take longer than his two hours.
What is HackerTube?
HackerTube is a video site that looks and works like YouTube but only shows videos that people on Hacker News, a popular tech discussion site, have recommended again and again. It holds 6,454 videos across 150 topics, picked from comments posted between 2007 and 2026.
Karpathy explained why in a blog post dated Saturday, October 31, 2026. At 11pm the night before, he opened YouTube and found what he called "an enshittified wall of slop," with exaggerated thumbnails and the same tired recommendations. The next morning he asked Claude to build a YouTube clone from Hacker News picks.
The finished site has a few touches that YouTube doesn't:
- No clickbait thumbnails. Each video shows a frame from halfway through instead of the image the uploader chose.
- Recommendations without an account. A "For You" feed works with no logins, keeping what it learns about you in your own browser session.
- Keyboard shortcuts for getting around.
- A data download. Karpathy offers the site's data so you can hand it to your own AI agent and make your own version.
He shared it on X on Sunday afternoon, and the post passed about 3.3 million views, according to X.
Weekend hack: HackerTube. I was annoyed with YouTube's recommendations so I had Claude filter down 43M comments over 20 years of HN to 6,454 videos that keep being recommended. *Significantly* better viewing experience, ~2 hours with Opus 5.5:
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) November 1, 2026
How did Karpathy build HackerTube with Claude?
He used Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent (an AI tool that writes, runs and fixes code on its own while you describe what you want in plain words). He runs it in the desktop app for Mac, with the Opus 5.5 model set to Medium effort.
According to his blog post, Claude downloaded all of Hacker News's comments, then used a Claude Code feature called Workflow to run the faster Sonnet model over them, weed out spam and narrow everything down to about 40,000 comments that recommend a YouTube video. Then it wrapped the results in a YouTube-like design and set up the live site.
Karpathy says he did three things by hand:
- He created an API key in Google Cloud. An API key is a password-like code that lets a program pull data from a service, here the details of each YouTube video.
- He started up a VPS, a rented virtual server online that keeps a website running around the clock.
- He bought the domain name.
After the server was up, he gave Claude its address and told it to deploy the site, secure it and tune it. "I don't actually do anything resembling traditional engineering anymore," he wrote, adding that he only talks to Claude and has it do everything.
In a joking reply on X, he summed up his "prompt" as: "Hi Claude good morning how are you I'm great thx build me a YouTube-style site but restricted to videos that have been repeatedly recommended on HN over the years pls. Don't make any mistakes." (source). That's a joke, not the real instructions.
Can you build an app with Claude without coding?
For small personal tools, increasingly yes. Claude Code comes with every paid Claude plan, starting with Pro at US$20 a month, according to Claude's pricing page. You describe the tool, the agent writes and runs the code, and you check that the result does what you asked.
Karpathy's build still leaned on things a beginner may not have yet: a Google Cloud account, a server and a domain, plus years of knowing what a good result looks like. The coding was handed off. The decisions about what to build, what data to trust and when it was finished stayed with him.
What's the catch?
- "About 2 hours" is his own estimate. So is the claim that Claude did nearly everything. Nobody else has timed it.
- He's a very experienced engineer. Knowing what to ask for, and spotting when the agent gets it wrong, saves a lot of time. Expect a first project of your own to take longer.
- It's a personal project. HackerTube is a weekend hack from one person, with no company behind it, so there's no promise it stays online or keeps updating.
- The videos still come from YouTube. HackerTube picks and arranges them, but the videos themselves link to YouTube.
Our take
We think HackerTube is a better advert for AI coding agents than any benchmark chart. It's small, it fixes one person's real annoyance, and it's useful to other people the day it ships. That's the kind of software most of us could use more of: tools built for an audience of one, or one family, or one small team.
The part we'd slow down on is the last step. Asking an agent to put a site on the public internet and "secure, harden" it is easy to type and hard for a beginner to check. Karpathy can tell whether a server is locked down. Most people can't. Build your first tool to run on your own computer, get it working, and only put it online once you or someone you trust can look over what the agent did. And to every video platform watching 3.3 million people cheer for a feed with no clickbait: that's a signal about what viewers want.
— Artificially Nerdy
What to do now
- Pick one small annoyance you'd fix with your own tool, and describe it in two or three plain sentences before you open any AI app.
- Start on your own computer. A tool that runs locally needs no server, domain or monthly hosting bill.
- Handle accounts and keys yourself. Create API keys by hand, as Karpathy did, and never paste them into a public post, shared doc or screenshot.
- Ask the agent to explain each step it takes. When it says it secured something, ask what exactly it changed.
- Watch your plan's usage. Long agent sessions eat into your allowance fast, and Claude's top plan dropped its five-hour limit last week while keeping a weekly cap.
- Want a head start? Download HackerTube's data from the site and ask your AI agent to build your own take on it.
FAQ
Do I need an account to use HackerTube?
No. Karpathy says the site has no user accounts. Its "For You" recommendations are stored in your own browser session.
Which Claude model did Karpathy use?
Opus 5.5 on Medium effort, running in the Claude Code desktop app for Mac. Claude also used the Sonnet model to sort through the Hacker News comments.
How were the 6,454 videos chosen?
Claude filtered Hacker News comments from 2007 to 2026 down to about 40,000 that recommend a YouTube video, then kept the videos that several people recommended. Karpathy's X post says it started from 43 million comments.
Where can I talk about HackerTube with other people?
There's an active Hacker News discussion about the site.
Sources
- Andrej Karpathy: HackerTube, blog post dated October 31, 2026; motivation, process, features, the three manual steps and his tools (Claude Code desktop app, Opus 5.5 on Medium effort). Read November 2, 2026.
- HackerTube, the site.
- Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) on X, November 1, 2026, 1:14pm ET; launch post (43M comments, 6,454 videos, ~2 hours with Opus 5.5).
- Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) on X, reply, November 1, 2026, 2:46pm ET; the joke "prompt."
- Hacker News discussion of HackerTube.
- Claude pricing; Claude Code included on paid plans, Pro at US$20 a month billed monthly. Read November 2, 2026.
