Karpathy's Honest Take: AI Agents Still Can't Optimize My Code (But I Haven't Given Up)

Opus 4.6 & Codex 5.3 sped up Karpathy's GPT-2 training by 3 mins. Karpathy failed similar attempts, noting AI's weak open-ended code optimization. Opus deletes comments, ignores CLAUDE.md, and errs. Yet, with oversight, models are useful.