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On November 1, 2026, Andrej Karpathy built HackerTube, a YouTube clone, using Claude Opus 5.5 (Claude Code), taking about two hours in total. He had Claude filter through Hacker News comments to identify YouTube videos that had been repeatedly recommended over nearly two decades, compiling 6,454 videos spanning 150 topics from 2007 to 2026. He personally did only three things: applying for a Google API key, setting up a VPS, and buying a domain; the rest was accomplished through conversation with Claude. Once the VPS was up, he handed the IP to it to update, deploy, harden, and optimize on its own. The site's thumbnails were changed to use 50% progress frames; For You requires no login, with state stored in the browser's local session, and the data can be exported for one's own agent to make variants. On November 2, a report recounted the above process.
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Karpathy builds HackerTube with Claude Opus 5.5 in two hours
Source:Shao Meng
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Nov 2
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Rohan Paul
Karpathy builds HackerTube with Claude Opus 5.5 in two hours
Karpathy used Claude Code with Opus 5.5 (Medium effort) to build HackerTube in about two hours: he had Claude filter 43 million comments from 20 years of Hacker News down to 6,454 repeatedly recommended videos, and built and launched a browsing website. He said he only conversed with Claude throughout the process; the only manual parts were creating an API key on Google Cloud, starting a VPS, and purchasing a domain, after which he handed the IP to Claude to complete updates, hardening, deployment, and optimization. He also packaged the comment analysis data into a zip file so others can have Claude generate their own version.
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Yuchen JinRelated discussion
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Andrej Karpathy
Karpathy built HackerTube with Claude, filtering 6,454 videos from 43 million HN comments
Karpathy released the weekend project HackerTube, using Claude to filter 6,454 repeatedly recommended videos from 43 million comments spanning 20 years of HN. The entire project was completed in about 2 hours using Opus 5.5. The site provides recommendations without requiring login, thumbnails are taken from a representative frame in the middle of the video, and the comment analysis data is packaged as a zip file that can be handed to Claude to generate your own version. He used the Mac desktop version of Claude Code and manually did only three things: applying for a Google Cloud API key, starting a VPS, and purchasing a domain. After that, he had Claude handle updates, security hardening, deployment, and code optimization.
Nov 1
Shao Meng
Karpathy Built HackerTube in Two Hours with Claude Opus 5.5
Andrej Karpathy used Claude Opus 5.5 (Claude Code) to filter YouTube videos recommended over the past two decades from Hacker News comments and built HackerTube, a YouTube look-alike. About 40,000 recommendation comments were consolidated into 6,454 videos spanning 2007–2026 and covering 150 topics, all in roughly two hours. By hand, he did only three things: apply for a Google API key, spin up a VPS, and buy a domain; the rest was done by conversing with Claude. Once the VPS was up, he handed over the IP and let it update, deploy, harden, and optimize on its own. The site's thumbnails use the 50% progress frame, For You requires no login and stores state in the browser's local session, and the data can be exported for your own agent to make further variants.
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