Andrej Karpathy launches HackerTube, a Claude-curated YouTube alternative built from Hacker News comments

Photo: Tim Witzdam / Pexels

The former Tesla AI chief used Anthropic's models to mine nearly two decades of comments for 6,454 community-vetted videos

Andrej Karpathy has launched HackerTube, a video site that skips the algorithm and asks a simpler question: what did Hacker News commenters actually recommend?

The answer, after AI processing, is 6,454 videos sorted into 150 topics. It’s a YouTube alternative assembled from the collective memory of one of the internet’s most opinionated comment sections.

How HackerTube was built

Karpathy, the former head of AI at Tesla, launched the site on October 31, 2026. It lives at hackertube.org.

The concept is narrow by design. Every video on the platform had to be recommended somewhere in Hacker News comments, the long-running discussion board popular with engineers, founders, and people with strong feelings about text editors.

To build it, Karpathy used Anthropic’s AI models. Claude Opus 5.5 handled management of the project, while Claude Sonnet did the filtering work.

Those models chewed through nearly 40,000 Hacker News comments over a...