Karpathy Builds HackerTube in 2 Hours with Claude
Original: HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN
Why This Matters
Shows how fast one developer plus a frontier model can ship a full product.
Andrej Karpathy used Claude Opus 5.5 to build HackerTube, a YouTube clone curated from 40K HN comments recommending 6,454 videos across 150 topics, completed in roughly 2 hours on a Saturday morning.
Fed up with YouTube's recommendation feed — what he called 'an enshittified wall of slop' — Andrej Karpathy handed the problem to Claude Opus 5.5 on a Saturday morning. The result: hackertube.org, a YouTube-style interface built entirely around videos that Hacker News users have actually recommended in comments between 2007 and 2026.
The pipeline was fully AI-driven. Opus downloaded the entire HN comment archive, filtered for video recommendations, then ran Claude Sonnet over those results to strip spam and low-quality entries. What remained: 40,000 qualifying comments pointing to 6,454 YouTube videos spanning 150 topic categories.
The site skips the platform's uploaded thumbnails in favor of mid-video frames (the '50% thumbnail'), offers personalized ForYou recommendations without user accounts by storing state in the local browser session, and includes keyboard shortcuts. A full data export is also available so users can feed the dataset directly to their own AI agents.
Karpathy noted the entire build — domain registration, VPS deployment, security hardening, and optimization — took around two hours. The project is a pointed demonstration of how quickly a solo developer armed with a capable model can ship a working product end-to-end.