Co-founder of OpenAI created an alternative to YouTube using Claude in two hours

Andrey Karpaty launched HackerTube — a site with videos that Hacker News users recommended to each other for nearly 20 years. Almost all the work, from analyzing comments to launching the site, was done by the neural network Claude.

The idea arose from dissatisfaction with YouTube's recommendations. Instead of an algorithm that selects videos for the average viewer, Karpaty decided to rely on advice from real people.

The basis was the Hacker News archive — a forum popular among programmers and startup founders. Claude analyzed about 43 million comments from 2007 to 2026, removed spam, and found about 40 thousand messages in which users recommended watching a YouTube video. From these, a catalog of 6454 videos on 150 topics was created.

The main model in the project was Claude Opus 5.5. A lighter model, Claude Sonnet, performed mass labeling of comments. The entire project took about two hours in the Claude Code application.

Manually, Karpaty did three things: created a YouTube API key in the Google Cloud console, rented a server, and bought a domain. He entrusted Claude with deploying the site, configuring security, and optimizing the code.

HackerTube works without registration; history and settings are stored in the browser. Videos can be filtered by topic, duration, and date. Video cards show a frame from the middle of the video, not the cover image created by the author for clicks.

Karpaty also published the project data so others could replicate the idea and build their own version of the service.

Source: Andrej Karpathy