HackerTube: YouTube built from HN-recommended videos
The gist
Former Tesla AI head Andrej Karpathy had Claude build HackerTube, a YouTube clone of 6,454 Hacker News-recommended videos.
The two-hour build tests whether AI can replace YouTube's algorithm with human curation.
How it unfolded
- Oct 30, 2026 23:00Karpathy opens YouTube, is tired, and finds an "enshittified wall of slop" of exaggerated thumbnails, recycled topics and low-grade content.
- Oct 31, 2026He gives Claude Opus 5.5 the task of writing a YouTube clone based on videos recommended on Hacker News. The model downloads and filters HN comments and runs Sonnet over them to strip spam, narrowing to about 40,000 comments recommending a video.
- Oct 31, 2026HackerTube launches at hackertube.org with 6,454 videos across 150 topics, recommended by HN users from 2007-2026. The build took about two hours and around 504M input tokens, 90% cached, plus 7.6M output tokens.