HackerTube launches with AI-built YouTube-style recommendations
Andrej Karpathy says he used Claude Code with Claude Opus 5.5 to build HackerTube, a YouTube-style site based on videos recommended in Hacker News comments. The workflow filtered roughly 43 million comments into 40,000 recommendations spanning 6,454 videos and 150 topics from 2007–2026. The site offers account-free recommendations stored in the browser session, keyboard shortcuts, representative video frames, and a downloadable ZIP of the underlying analysis data.
HackerTube demonstrates an agent-assisted workflow that turns a large community archive into a working recommendation site, while its exported dataset allows others to build alternate versions.
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://hackertube.org/
- 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.
#HackerTube#Claude Code#Claude Opus 5.5#Claude Sonnet#YouTube#Hacker News