OpenAI Cofounder Builds New Open Source LLM 'Nanochat' - and Doesn't Use Vibe Coding (gizmodo.com)
(Saturday October 18, 2025 @11:34PM (EditorDavid)
from the model-behavior dept.)
- Reference: 0179825770
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/10/19/0022237/openai-cofounder-builds-new-open-source-llm-nanochat---and-doesnt-use-vibe-coding
- Source link: https://gizmodo.com/even-the-inventor-of-vibe-coding-says-vibe-coding-cant-cut-it-2000672821
An anonymous reader shared [1]this report from Gizmodo :
> It's been over a year since OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy [2]exited the company . In the time since he's been gone, he coined and popularized the term " [3]vibe coding " to describe the practice of farming out coding projects to AI tools. But earlier this week, when he released [4]his own open source model called nanochat , he [5]admitted that he wrote the whole thing by hand, vibes be damned.
>
> Nanochat, [6]according to Karpathy , is a "minimal, from scratch, full-stack training/inference pipeline" that is designed to let anyone build a large language model with a ChatGPT-style chatbot interface in a matter of hours and for as little as $100. Karpathy said the project contains about 8,000 lines of "quite clean code," which he wrote by hand — not necessarily by choice, but because he found AI tools couldn't do what he needed.
>
> "It's basically entirely hand-written (with tab autocomplete)," he wrote. "I tried to use claude/codex agents a few times but they just didn't work well enough at all and net unhelpful."
[1] https://gizmodo.com/even-the-inventor-of-vibe-coding-says-vibe-coding-cant-cut-it-2000672821
[2] https://gizmodo.com/founding-openai-member-andrej-karpathy-leaves-company-1851255288
[3] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
[4] https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat
[5] https://archive.is/WfLJy
[6] https://archive.is/LiEll
> It's been over a year since OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy [2]exited the company . In the time since he's been gone, he coined and popularized the term " [3]vibe coding " to describe the practice of farming out coding projects to AI tools. But earlier this week, when he released [4]his own open source model called nanochat , he [5]admitted that he wrote the whole thing by hand, vibes be damned.
>
> Nanochat, [6]according to Karpathy , is a "minimal, from scratch, full-stack training/inference pipeline" that is designed to let anyone build a large language model with a ChatGPT-style chatbot interface in a matter of hours and for as little as $100. Karpathy said the project contains about 8,000 lines of "quite clean code," which he wrote by hand — not necessarily by choice, but because he found AI tools couldn't do what he needed.
>
> "It's basically entirely hand-written (with tab autocomplete)," he wrote. "I tried to use claude/codex agents a few times but they just didn't work well enough at all and net unhelpful."
[1] https://gizmodo.com/even-the-inventor-of-vibe-coding-says-vibe-coding-cant-cut-it-2000672821
[2] https://gizmodo.com/founding-openai-member-andrej-karpathy-leaves-company-1851255288
[3] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
[4] https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat
[5] https://archive.is/WfLJy
[6] https://archive.is/LiEll