# Karpathy introduces TristanTube, a curated YouTube viewing site built with Claude Code

> Original title: Earlier this week Tristan published his top YouTube channels:

- Source: Andrej Karpathy
- Published: 2026-11-07T17:07:31.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/zqln21t121hg25smudgcf3xuy
- Original: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2119114537442189652

## Summary

Andrej Karpathy introduces TristanTube, a curated video viewing site built from Tristan's top YouTube channels list, with 47K videos and a TV mode. He says Claude Code built it in three minutes.

## Why it matters

The post shows how a developer built a filtered YouTube viewing site with Claude Code, detailing the tools, steps, and data used.

## Post

Earlier this week Tristan published his top YouTube channels:
https://thume.ca/2026/11/01/youtube-tier-list-2026/
Which looked excellent so clearly I had to turn it into TristanTube:
https://karpathy.ai/tristan-tube/
47K super nerdy videos +TV mode for laid back watching. (One-shotted with Claude Code in 3 minutes)

## Quoted post @karpathy

> Weekend hack: HackerTube. I was annoyed with YouTube's recommendations so I had Claude filter down 43M comments over 20 years of HN to 6,454 videos that keep being recommended. *Significantly* better viewing experience, ~2 hours with Opus 5.5:
> https://hackertube.org/
> 
> - Excellent recs without any logins (state is kept in local browser session)
> - Thumbnail is a representative frame from middle of the video instead of the super duper A/B test hyper-optimized user uploads
> - Underlying data from the comment analysis as one zip file, point your Claude at it and ask for your own version
> - HackerTube Longs ✊
> 
> A bit more on the process:
> I use Claude Code (desktop app for Mac), Opus 5.5 on Medium effort as my default. I only talk to Claude and have it do everything, the only "manual work" I helped with in tandem was in the browser (reminiscent of MenuGen): 1) I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata, 2) I booted up a VPS box for serving and 3) I bought the domain name. Once the box was up I gave Claude the IP and told it update, secure, harden, deploy and optimize the code, and it did the whole thing.
> 
> Many awesome projects that would have normally taken weeks/months even can now be few-shotted for breakfast. What else are we not thinking of.

https://x.com/karpathy/status/2116957135661945283