Karpathy launches HackerTube, a YouTube-style feed of Hacker News picks

Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder and former head of Tesla's Autopilot team, has released HackerTube, a YouTube-style showcase made up only of videos that Hacker News users have recommended. He says he built it in roughly two hours using Claude Code and the Opus 5.5 model.

Despite the "YouTube clone" label, HackerTube is not a video platform. The videos stay on YouTube; the site simply offers a different filter on top of them. Karpathy says the idea came on a Friday night, when he found YouTube's oversized thumbnails and repetitive recommendations unbearable and decided to build something that suits him better.

How the catalogue was built

According to Karpathy, Opus downloaded all Hacker News comments, filtered them and ran them through the Sonnet model inside a Claude Code workflow to remove spam. That left about 40,000 comments mentioning YouTube videos. The result is 6,454 videos recommended between 2007 and 2026, sorted into 150 topics.

The interface imitates YouTube. Thumbnails use a frame from the middle of each video rather than the image uploaded by the author. A "For You" section offers personalised suggestions without accounts, storing data in the browser's local session. Site data can also be exported, so a developer can easily create a custom version.

A workflow with little manual work

Karpathy uses the Claude Code desktop app on Mac with Opus 5.5 at Medium effort, and says he no longer does traditional engineering work such as writing code or running terminal commands. He simply talks to Claude. His only manual tasks on this project were creating a Google Cloud API key to fetch YouTube video metadata and buying the domain name, which he did while Claude worked.

Once a server was ready, he gave Claude its IP address and asked it to handle updates, deployment, security hardening and code optimisation, which it did on its own.

The project is live at hackertube.org. It is a small example of how far "vibe coding" has moved: a personal annoyance turned into a public, working site over a single weekend morning.