Karpathy builds HackerTube in about 2 hours with Claude Code and Opus 5.5: a YouTube clone of 6,454 videos recommended on Hacker News
On Oct 31 Andrej Karpathy published HackerTube (hackertube.org) on his personal blog: a YouTube-style site that only lists the 6,454 YouTube videos recommended in Hacker News comments from 2007 to 2026, grouped into 150 topics. He says Opus 5.5 in Claude Code did the work: it downloaded every HN comment, ran Sonnet over them in a Workflow to narrow things down to about 40K comments recommending a video, wrapped the result in a YouTube UI, then deployed and hardened it on a VPS, all in about 2 hours. His only manual steps were creating a YouTube API key, booting the VPS and buying the domain. His HN submission reached the front page with about 1,005 points and 308 comments.
Key Takeaways
- Source: Karpathy's personal blog post HackerTube (Oct 31), with the site live at hackertube.org
- Scale: from every HN comment it narrowed things down to about 40K comments recommending a YouTube video, giving 6,454 videos across 150 topics from 2007 to 2026 (author-reported)
- Method: Opus 5.5 ran the download and overall pipeline, used Claude Code's Workflow feature to have Sonnet filter comments and drop spam in bulk, then built a YouTube-style front end and deployed and hardened it on a VPS
- Product details: it uses the frame at the 50% mark instead of the uploaded thumbnail, offers account-free For You picks with state kept only in the local browser, supports keyboard shortcuts, and exports the site's data so you can hand it to your own agent to build a variant
- Workflow: Karpathy says Opus 5.5 on Medium effort is his default and he no longer reads or writes code or runs terminal commands himself; the HN post has about 1,005 points and 308 comments (public HN data as of Nov 1, 14:10 SGT)
Linked Models & Agents:
