Karpathy builds YouTube alternative with AI in two hours

What's new

Andrej Karpathy has launched HackerTube, a kind of alternative to YouTube. Instead of an algorithm choosing what you watch, the site shows videos that users of the news forum Hacker News have recommended in their comments. The service is live at hackertube.org.

Karpathy says he built it because he was tired of YouTube, which he describes as full of low-quality content and exaggerated thumbnails (the small cover images for videos). The collection holds 6,454 unique YouTube videos spread across 150 topics.

What's clever

The most remarkable thing is how it was made. According to Karpathy's own blog post, the service was built with Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Code in about two hours. Opus pulled Hacker News comments from 2007 to 2026, and the smaller Claude Sonnet model was used to filter out spam and low-quality content. That left about 40,000 comments with video recommendations. Karpathy himself did only a few things by hand: he created a Google Cloud API key, set up a server (a VPS) and bought the domain.

The site does not show the uploaders' own cover images, but a frame taken from the middle of each video. That takes some of the clickbait out of the picture. Personal recommendations require no account, because data is stored locally in your browser. There are keyboard shortcuts, and the dataset can be exported so others can build their own version, for example with an AI agent.

According to a summary on daily.dev, the project used roughly 504 million input tokens (90 percent cached, meaning reused) and 7.6 million output tokens. Tokens are the chunks of text that AI models read and write. The figures come from a secondary source.

Cheaper or better?

The price has not been disclosed. The site appears open and free of charge, and nothing is said about restrictions for the EU or Denmark, but no official pricing model is listed. There is also no documented comparison with similar projects such as Hacker News TV, HN.watch and MCPTube, so it is unclear whether HackerTube is better.

It is also unclear how many of the 6,454 videos can still be watched on YouTube, and how good the selection is in practice. Almost all the figures come from Karpathy's own blog post, in other words from the creator himself.

What it's good for

HackerTube suits anyone who is curious about technology, programming and science and wants to find good talks and explanations without wading through YouTube's recommendations. The site has sections such as Liked, History and Watch later, categories, playlists, settings and a filter for long videos, so you can find an in-depth video when you have time.

For general readers, the story is almost as interesting as the service: an entire video service with 40,000 comments as raw material was set up in about two hours with AI as the primary builder.