isky

karpathy just admitted that his own app got oneshotted and he thinks yours is next. he built menu gen. you take a photo of a restaurant menu and it shows you pictures of what the food actually looks like (because 30-50% of menu items you genuinely have no clue what they are) he vibe coded the whole thing: photo upload → ocr extracts item names → image model generates a picture for each dish → app re-renders the menu with photos next to every item → deployed on vercel but then someone showed him the "software 3.0" version: 1. take the same photo. 2. give it to gemini. 3. say "overlay pictures of each dish onto the menu" gemini returned the original menu photo with food images rendered directly into the pixels just 1 prompt and his entire app became entirely unnecessary here's karpathy's way to test if you're still stuck building in old paradigm: 1. take away all the code in your app. 2. give the raw input directly to an llm. is the output roughly the same? if yes, your code is just adding steps between the input and the output. karpathy thinks the apps that survive are the ones where the code does something the model genuinely can't: > persisting state across users > enforcing access controls > processing payments > connecting to hardware he calls anything else outdated "software 1.0 thinking." the question to ask yourself before you build anything right now: is this an app, or is it just a prompt with extra steps? you simply won't win if your answer is the latter