Remember when YouTube was simply about the joy of stumbling upon something interesting? An era when Charlie Bit My Finger, random home videos, and thought-provoking talks like Sir Ken Robinson’s iconic TED Talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity? could capture millions of viewers without algorithmically engineered recommendations, clickbait headlines or flashy thumbnails.
Slovak-Canadian AI researcher and co-founder of OpenAI, Andrej Karpathy, claimed that he used Claude to make a highly customized version of YouTube (a “clone” in his language) that only shows recommended videos from Hacker News, a popular forum for the tech community.
Karpathy claimed that Claude’s Opus 5.5 used just two hours to sift through 43 million comments made on Hacker News website in the past 20 years of its inception. The result was HackerTube, a website made by Claude that only shows embedded YouTube videos that are highly recommended by the tech community on Hacker News.
The HackerTube website consists of 6454 YouTube videos across 150 topics that have been recommended by people on Hacker News from 2007 to 2026.
Weekend hack: HackerTube. I was annoyed with YouTube’s recommendations so I had Claude filter down 43M comments over 20 years of HN to 6,454 videos that keep being recommended. *Significantly* better viewing experience, ~2 hours with Opus 5.5:
https://t.co/JIhXN7OSh1– Excellent recs without any logins (state is kept in local browser session)
– Thumbnail is a representative frame from middle of the video instead of the super duper A/B test hyper-optimized user uploads
– Underlying data from the comment analysis as one zip file, point your Claude at it and ask for your own version
– HackerTube Longs ✊A bit more on the process:
I use Claude Code (desktop app for Mac), Opus 5.5 on Medium effort as my default. I only talk to Claude and have it do everything, the only “manual work” I helped with in tandem was in the browser (reminiscent of MenuGen): 1) I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata, 2) I booted up a VPS box for serving and 3) I bought the domain name. Once the box was up I gave Claude the IP and told it update, secure, harden, deploy and optimize the code, and it did the whole thing.Many awesome projects that would have normally taken weeks/months even can now be few-shotted for breakfast. What else are we not thinking of.
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) November 1, 2026
In a blogpost made on Sunday, Karpathy said that after visiting YouTube last Friday, he was annoyed by the “enshittified wall of slop. Insanely exaggerated thumbnails, dumb recommendations of the same tired topics, truly terrible idiocracy-grade content.”
“I’m sure this algorithm works well for the median person on the internet, but it definitely does not work for me. So this morning (Saturday) I took a hold of my Opus 5.5 and gave it the task: Let’s write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News. Opus downloaded all comments of HackerNews, filtered them, ran Sonnet over them in a Workflow (Claude Code feature), got rid of spam, and narrowed everything down to 40K comments recommending a YouTube video,” said Karpathy.
The 40-year-old AI researcher, who has also served as former director of AI at Tesla and recently joined Anthropic, said that the only “manual work” he did in the process was to create an API key from Google Cloud UI, setting up VPS box and buying a domain name.
“ Once the box was up I gave Claude the IP and told it update, secure, harden, deploy and optimize the code, and it did the whole thing,” claimed Karpathy.
Also Read: Andrej Karpathy Says 6 Billion People Have Never Used LLMs as AI Divide Widens
