Andrej Karpathy had Claude build HackerTube, a YouTube without clickbait thumbnails

Andrej Karpathy, the OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI director, launched HackerTube on Saturday (Oct. 31), a YouTube-style site that lists only the videos Hacker News commenters keep recommending to each other. He didn't write it himself. Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 built it in Claude Code in "~2 hours," Karpathy wrote on his blog.

The idea started on a Friday night. Karpathy said he opened YouTube at 11 p.m. and found "an enshittified wall of slop," with "insanely exaggerated thumbnails" and "dumb recommendations." The next morning he gave Opus one task: "Let's write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News."

HackerTube isn't a new video platform. It doesn't host anything. It's a curated front end: videos play through YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed, and the site's About page says it isn't affiliated with YouTube, Google, Hacker News or Y Combinator.

What HackerTube does

The headline feature is a single switch. HackerTube's Settings page has one option, "Show video frames instead of thumbnails," and it's on by default. The site describes it this way: "YouTube thumbnails are designed by uploaders to grab your attention: big faces, arrows, shouting text. With this on, every video is shown with a frame from the middle of the video instead, so you see what it actually looks like. Turn it off to see the original thumbnails."

In practice, the home grid shows lecturers at podiums and slides mid-talk instead of shocked faces and red arrows. Karpathy explained on Hacker News that the image is "sourced from exactly halfway in the video, so you get a representative frame."

The rest of the site borrows YouTube's layout but drops the account:

• For You without a login. Home mixes HN classics, "hidden gems" with few views, recent favorites and topics you haven't explored. Likes steer the feed, but there are no accounts: likes, history and Watch later are "stored only in this browser," according to the About page.
• 150 topics. Videos are sorted into 150 topics in 16 areas, browsable from Categories and Playlists. Search works on meaning, so "distributed systems" finds talks that never use the phrase.
• Keyboard shortcuts. Press ? for the list, / to search, and j and k to move through videos.
• Longs. Where YouTube puts Shorts, HackerTube has Longs: every video over an hour, which Karpathy added after a commenter joked about "HackerTube Shorts."
• A data export. A 17.8 MB zip holds all 6,454 videos, 39,834 labeled HN comments, the topic list and search embeddings, under the ODC-By 1.0 license. It leaves out YouTube's own metadata, which the site says YouTube's terms don't allow it to redistribute.

Each video page also shows what Hacker News actually said about it, with links back to the original comments.

How Claude built it

Karpathy said his only "manual work" was creating a Google Cloud API key for YouTube metadata, booting a VPS and buying the domain. "I don't actually do anything resembling traditional engineering anymore," he wrote. He used the Claude Code desktop app on a Mac with Opus 5.5 on Medium effort.

Opus downloaded the full HN comment archive and ran Claude Sonnet over it in a Claude Code Workflow to remove spam and find real recommendations. Karpathy put the scale at "43M comments over 20 years of HN." The About page says a video makes the cut only if at least three different people linked it, in at least three different months, and that Claude judged whether each link was a recommendation, a citation, a joke or criticism. Videos rank by how many separate months they were recommended in.

Asked about cost on Hacker News, Karpathy said Claude tallied 504 million input tokens (90% cached) and 7.6 million output tokens, adding that more than 90% went to Sonnet labeling comments and that the app and deployment took about 1 million Opus tokens. He built it on a subscription and didn't give a dollar figure.

The Hacker News thread has drawn more than 2,700 points and 600 comments, and Karpathy shipped requests live. He posted a changelog adding filters for upload date, duration and type, a "Recently recommended" sort, a like-ratio sort, a "Play all on YouTube" button that builds a temporary playlist of up to 50 videos, and Longs.

Not every comment was a feature request. One commenter warned that the original logo was close enough to YouTube's "to draw intimidation from Google," and Karpathy said he removed "the YouTube-looking logo." Another said YouTube "is quick to ban any use of its content on a third party site." Google hasn't commented publicly on HackerTube.

Karpathy hasn't released the server code, calling it "a vibe coded mess." His suggestion instead: point your own Opus at the data zip and ask for a YouTube-like site. That part, he said, "was like 3 min."