Andrej Karpathy published HackerTube on October 31, 2026, after a Friday night spent facing what he called an enshittified wall of YouTube recommendations. In a Bear Blog post the next morning, he wrote that Claude Opus 5.5, steered through Claude Code on a Mac desktop at Medium effort, produced a YouTube-style site of videos that Hacker News commenters had actually recommended.
Key Facts
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Site | hackertube.org |
| Announced | October 31, 2026 (Karpathy blog) |
| Build tool | Claude Code (Mac desktop app), Opus 5.5 at Medium effort |
| Stated build time | About 2 hours |
| Catalog | 6,454 YouTube videos, ~150 topics, recommendations spanning 2007–2026 |
| Comment filter | Downloaded HN comments, filtered, then Sonnet in a Claude Code Workflow removed spam; narrowed to about 40K comments that recommend a YouTube video |
| Thumbnails | Frame at 50% of the video, not the uploaded thumbnail |
| ForYou | Stored in the local browser session; no account required |
| Data | Site data export as a zip for agents or forks |
| Manual steps Karpathy says he did | Google Cloud YouTube API key, boot a VPS, buy the domain |
Background
Karpathy framed the project as a personal escape from exaggerated thumbnails and repetitive recommendations. Opus, he wrote, downloaded Hacker News comments, filtered them, and ran Sonnet over them in a Claude Code Workflow until about 40,000 recommending comments remained. Those comments map to 6,454 videos across roughly 150 topics from 2007 through 2026. The UI wraps YouTube embeds rather than rehosting video files.
In an edit to the same post, he said he no longer does traditional engineering steps such as reading or writing code or running terminal commands himself. He only talks to Claude. Once the VPS was up, he gave Claude the IP and told it to update, deploy, secure, harden, and optimize.
CryptoBriefing (Diego Almada Lopez, November 1, 2026) restates the catalog size, the Opus/Sonnet split, the 50% thumbnail, account-free ForYou storage, and the three manual steps. Kingy (Curtis Pyke, November 1, 2026) inspected the October 31 public export and counted 6,454 distinct video IDs and 39,834 comment–video mention pairs. Kingy also summarizes HackerTube’s own data docs: recurring mentions, model-generated labels, and a downloadable zip that includes DATA.md aimed at agents.
Reactions and Impact
The announcement thread on Hacker News (posted by karpathy) drew heavy discussion. Several commenters said the feed felt closer to what they want than YouTube’s personalized home page. Others asked for recency sorting, YouTube playlists, and clearer filters; Karpathy replied in-thread that he added recency filtering shortly after launch.
In that same HN thread, Karpathy answered a cost question with a Claude-assisted tally: about 504 million input tokens (roughly 90% cached) and 7.6 million output tokens, with most of the volume going to Sonnet comment labeling, and about 1 million tokens of Opus 5.5 for the app and deploy. He said he was on a subscription. Those figures are his reply, not an itemized API invoice.
What We Don't Know Yet
- How often the live catalog refreshes after the October 31 dump, and whether newer HN links will keep landing in the feed.
- Whether YouTube will treat the public embedding and metadata use as within its API and developer terms over time.
- Independent reproduction of the “about two hours” clock time outside Karpathy’s own account.
- A reliable dollar cost for the build; public numbers are token counts from his HN reply, not a bill.