Andrej Karpathy: Best IDE for programming | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

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GUEST BIO:
Andrej Karpathy is a legendary AI researcher, engineer, and educator. He's the former director of AI at Tesla, a founding member of OpenAI, and an educator at Stanford.

PODCAST INFO:

SOCIAL:

[LexClips]

Guest bio: Andrej Karpathy is a legendary AI researcher, engineer, and educator. He's the former director of AI at Tesla, a founding member of OpenAI, and an educator at Stanford.

[remarkpainting]

The 'lazy programmer' problem is the same problem with 'almost' self driving. If you not actively driving, you are not really able to just 'jump in' when there's an emergency, because you've not been 'following along' so to speak. But I think Copilot will become my favorite tool, especially as I am, by nature, a lazy programmer.

[johndinsdale]

Lex, your interview style is the best as a cloud platform architect you ask the questions I would but you have access to the greatest minds of our generation. You are the greatest resource on YT, please always stay humble, you are my hero👍

[extium]

I started using ML tools in my programming 2 years ago and ran Tabnine + Copilot simultaneously for few months. Then I noticed Tabnine contributes way less to my code than Copilot so I dropped it. It's really fantastic for anything that has patterns and sometimes when you first write a comment it will take a look at it and offer suggestions. I don't know why it doesn't always work with comment first workflow but it will catch the meaning what you're probably planning to do pretty fast. Sometimes it straight up saves a visit to stackoverflow or google.

VS Code with SSH remote is awesome so is LiveShare feature.

Programmers or anything to do with creativity will not be replaced by ML not until a true AGI is birthed, what happens after that is anybody's guess.

[Celdorsc]

I still use IntelliJ for Java and PyCharm for Python. I write in LaTeX so both apps integrate LaTeX via the same plugin. For everything else I use Emacs and NeoVim, although LaTeX is also extremely well handled by latter two apps, as well.

[coldham]

I love that 32, 000+ people are interested in what someone uses for their IDE. Beautiful.

[skylazart]

Additionally, if you’re working with python, use virtual environment and Pycharm integrates perfectly with that env

[Coldestadam]

I love Copilot, I agree that it is very good at finding relationships in my code to suggest code after giving a comment of explanation. I have my first software job out of college and I purchased copilot before I started because I just loved using it, but I’m afraid it will make me a bad programmer. It saves me a lot of time day to day, which I think right now gives me more value than the thought of me not being the best programmer.

[nroose]

As far I as am concerned, it's always been true that what to make is harder than how to make it. Software teams struggle with this and I don't think that is something that AI would be good at.

[DriveandThrive]

0:22 For me a triple monitor is the best. I'm so used to three monitors now its so painful when I'm forced to use only a laptop. If you have the space and can afford three monitors its definitely worth it. (I secretly want a 4th, a TV, above my setup and I keep my phone as even an additional screen below my main monitor. For productivity?! Not really lol)

[bettybunbun]

I use Pycharm from Jetbrains for Python. Haven't used copilot yet, but it looks promising.

[higgins]

Vim. The only IDE I've found to be tolerable after 20 years as a c/c++ programmer is QTCreator. But I still find myself spending most of my coding time in vim, all other IDE's, no matter how I customize them, end up just getting in the way and frustrating in the end.

[alexbecar]

Anything with vim bindings is decent but imo jetbrains editors are the goat

[jasongodmere]

It is certainly an opportunity for competent programmers to be even more productive in the near-term. As for the long term, what i can say is there will be no shortage of problems both minor and existential for us to overcome. We need problems to provide us purpose and to command a high standard from us so that we do not regress as a species. The more capable we are, the greater our problems. It's easy to forget that disaster is born from a misuse of potential, but that is not to say the potential itself is at fault. For better or worse, we must learn to adapt ourselves to this new domain of human endeavor so that its energy is utilized to sustain and expand our experiences instead of detract from them.

"With great power comes great responsibility"
Ben Parker - Spiderman

[Nil-jsbf]

I use VSCode for Typescript but I go to Intellij when I need to work with Java and Kotlin. The different keybindings are annoying, I try to make it as similar as possible with the VSCode keymaps plugin.

Intellij suffers from too many options all over the place and there's either too much bloat in the software or maybe it's just Java's ecosystem but I actually feel way more input delay with Intellij. It made me realize that this is what Primeagen must be feeling when he says VSCode's input lag kills his soul so he uses Vim. Not to say VSCode is free from luggishness when you have a large project with lots of complex typescript functions - would be great if TS server becomes faster.

Copilot is great but I would prefer prompts to appear faster. Sometimes I wait and nothing appears. Maybe it's the latency to Australia. As Karpathy says, it's mostly useful when there's some sort of obvious pattern going on - copilot is great at continuing it. It suggests 1 line at a time for me and I'm guessing there's a way to make it autosuggest an entire block but I'll need to look it up. It's also been useful for me when I work in Kotlin/Java which I don't consider myself fluent in. It's been super handy at introducing me to new APIs in that language.

[EvanZamir]

I have the exact same setup. VS Code running on a Mac but remotely connected to a Linux instance usually on EC2.

[frangalarza]

Lex, give VSCode a go. If you program on a strongly typed language, it does half the coding for you and you never have to leave the IDE to check documentation. Things have changed!

[TimothyFish]

Eclipse unless you are developing for the Windows GUI, in which case, Visual Studio. For Mac, probably Eclipse, but who really wants to develop on Mac? In my opinion, the Unit Test features of an IDE are much more important to which IDE to choose than the code writing features, since we spend more time testing than actually writing code.

[remarkpainting]

Also worth noting when thinking about the luddite view (and for those who think the luddites are wrong once again), AI is growing in strength and ability at 10X per year...much faster than Moore's law...so it may well get to the point pretty soon where programmers are more akin to the human managers of automated factories...our job will be to keep the AI working.

[animanaut]

have not used copilot yet, but one thing worries me: the training data set. if the vast majority contains, lets say 30 years worth of legacy, old c++, does it help with changed paradigms and language constructs? i see a case for boilerplate for notoriously boilerplatty languages or the mentioned copy/paste/modify but for everything else?