Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) “I attended a vibe coding hackathon recently and used the chance to build a web a” — TopicDigg

I attended a vibe coding hackathon recently and used the chance to build a web app (with auth, payments, deploy, etc.). I tinker but I am not a web dev by background, so besides the app, I was very interested in what it's like to vibe code a full web app today. As such, I wrote none of the code directly (Cursor+Claude/o3 did) and I don't really know how the app works, in the conventional sense that I'm used to as an engineer. The app is called MenuGen, and it is live on Basically I'm often confused about what all the things on a restaurant menu are - e.g. Pâté, Tagine, Cavatappi or Sweetbread (hint it's... not sweet). Enter MenuGen: you take a picture of a menu and it generates images for all the menu items and presents them in a nice list. I find it super useful to get a quick visual sense of the menu. But the more interesting part for me I thought was the exploration of vibe coding around how easy/hard it is to build and deploy a full web app today if you are not a web developer. So I wrote up the full blog post on my experience here, including some takeaways: Copy pasting just the TLDR: "Vibe coding menugen was exhilarating and fun escapade as a local demo, but a bit of a painful slog as a deployed, real app. Building a modern app is a bit like assembling IKEA future. There are all these services, docs, API keys, configurations, dev/prod deployments, team and security features, rate limits, pricing tiers... Meanwhile the LLMs have slightly outdated knowledge of everything, they make subtle but critical design mistakes when you watch them closely, and sometimes they hallucinate or gaslight you about solutions. But the most interesting part to me was that I didn't even spend all that much work in the code editor itself. I spent most of it in the browser, moving between tabs and settings and configuring and gluing a monster. All of this work and state is not even accessible or manipulatable by an LLM - how are we supposed to be automating society by 2027 like this?" See the post for full detail, and maybe give MenuGen a go the next time you're at a restaurant!