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Lightcone · 2 min · Jun 19, 2025

Shipping an AI-built app took longer than writing its code

Andrej Karpathy built a working menu-image app in hours, but spent another week on authentication, payments and deployment. The bottleneck was production plumbing, not code.

Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy is a former director of AI at Tesla; worked at Stanford and OpenAI.

Joined Anthropic's pretraining team; founded Eureka Labs, an AI-native school, after leading Tesla's Autopilot AI.

  • Garry Tan, Host · President & CEO, Y Combinator

    Co-founded Posterous and Initialized Capital, an early Coinbase backer.

  • Harj Taggar, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator

    Co-founded Auctomatic with the Collison brothers and later Triplebyte.

  • Diana Hu, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator

    CTO of Escher Reality; after Niantic bought it, ran AR for Pokémon GO.

  • Jared Friedman, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator

    Co-founded Scribd, which YC funded in 2006; has advised 20+ YC unicorns.

About this segment

Andrej Karpathy built a working menu-image app in hours, but spent another week on authentication, payments and deployment. The bottleneck was production plumbing, not code.

From “Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)”, Jun 19, 2025. Watch the full episode

“this was really hard and all of this was not code.”
Andrej Karpathyat 32:31 · Lightcone32:31

Takeaways

  1. A working demo took only a few hours to build.
  2. Authentication, payments and deployment took another week.
  3. Production setup—not coding—became the slog.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 18:14Build AI apps around human review and adjustable autonomy5:32
  2. 33:22Make software and documentation easier for agents to use5:04
  3. 7:51LLMs look more like operating systems than utilities6:59
  4. 26:08A flawless self-driving demo did not mean autonomy was near3:11

  5. 30:54Shipping an AI-built app took longer than writing its code2:28

  6. 3:51Neural nets gradually replaced Autopilot's hand-written code2:33Up next
  7. 14:47LLMs do not build organizational context on their own3:31

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 31:03

    So, I tried bytecoding a little bit as well because it's so fun, so bytecoding is so great when you want to build something super-duper custom that doesn't appear to exist and you just want to wing it because it's a Saturday or something like that. So, I built this iOS app and I don't, I can't actually program in Swift, but I was really shocked that I was able to build like a super basic app and I'm not going to explain it, it's really dumb, but I kind of like, this was just like a day of work and this was running on my phone like later that day and I was like wow, this is amazing.

  2. 31:32

    I didn't have to read through Swift for five days or something like that to get started. I also vibe-coded this app called Menugen, and this is live, you can try it in Menugen.app, and I basically have this problem where I show up at a restaurant, I read through the menu, and I have no idea what any of the things are, and I need pictures, so this doesn't exist, so I was like, hey, I'm gonna vibe-code it, so this is what it looks like.

  3. 31:55

    You go to Menugen.app, and you... take a picture of the menu, and then Menugen generates the images. And everyone gets $5 in credits for free when you sign up. And therefore, this is a major cost center in my life. So this is a negative revenue app for me right now. I've lost a huge amount of money on Menugen. Okay. But the fascinating thing about Menugen for me is that the code, the Vibe coding part, the code was actually the easy part of Vipe Coding Menugen.

  4. 32:33

    And most of it actually was when I tried to make it real so that you can actually have authentication and payments and the domain name and the virtual deployment, this was really hard and all of this was not code. All of this DevOps stuff was in me in the browser clicking stuff. And this was extreme slog and took another week. So it was really fascinating that I had the Menugen basically demo working on my laptop in a few hours and then it took me a week because I was trying to make it real.

  5. 33:01

    And the reason for this is this was just really annoying. So for example, if you try to add Google login to your web page, I know this is very small, but just a huge amount of instructions of this clerk library telling me how to integrate this. And this is crazy, like it's telling me,