← All IntelClip / EntertainmentMenuGen: the app that shouldn't exist
From Andrej Karpathy on Vibe Coding & Agentic Engineering (AI Ascent 2026) · ≈4:51
“And this blew my mind because actually all of my menu gen is spurious. It's working in the old paradigm that app shouldn't exist.”
“your neural network is doing more and more of the work, and your prompt or context is just the image, and the output is an image, and there's no need to have any of the app in between.”
What’s in it
- Watch a working MenuGen app get made obsolete by one prompt
- See Nano Banana render menu item images directly into a photo
- Grasp the 'Software 3.0' paradigm where the network does the work
Clip transcript
your agent? That's the programming paradigm now. I think one more maybe uh example that comes to mind that is even more extreme than that is when I was building um MenuGen. So, MenuGen is this idea where you um you come to a restaurant, they give you a menu, there's no pictures usually, so I don't know what any of these things are. Uh usually I like 30% of the things I don't have no idea what they are, 50%. So, I wanted to take a photo of the restaurant menu and to get pictures of what those things might look like in a generic sense. And so, I built I built coded this app that basically lets you upload a photo and it does all this stuff and it runs on Vercel and uh it basically re-renders the menu and it gives you like all the items and it gives you a picture that it uses an image um you know, generator uh for to basically OCR all the different titles, uh use the image generator to get pictures of them and then shows it to you. And then I saw the software 3.0 version of this, which is which blew my mind, which is literally just take your photo, give it to Gemini, and say use Nano Banana to overlay the the things onto the menu." Uh Uh and Nana Banana basically returned an image that is exactly the picture of the menu that I took, but it actually put into the pixels, it rendered the different things in the menu. And this blew my mind because actually all of my menu gen is spurious. It's working in the old paradigm that app shouldn't exist. Uh and uh yeah, the software 3.0 paradigm is a lot more kind of raw. It just um your neural network is doing more and more of the work, and your prompt or context is just the image, and the output is an image, and there's no need to have any of the app in between.
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