Karpathy Tests Claude 3 Opus: Writes 5,500 Lines of 3D Code in 2 Hours for $10
TAbrodi · x · 2026-08-02
Andrej Karpathy shared an experiment highlighting LLM capabilities in long-horizon coding and autonomous execution. He provided the model with the opening paragraph of The Lord of the Rings, alongside a budget of roughly 1 million tokens ($10), and asked it to generate a Three.js 3D render.
The model ran for about 2 hours and autonomously wrote 5,500 lines of code to procedurally render the story. Karpathy noted it was mind-boggling that the LLM could place and orchestrate 3D polygon assets in (x,y,z) coordinates and animate them, demonstrating capabilities far beyond traditional simple coding benchmarks.
Related event: Karpathy's LOTR 3D test pushes long-horizon model evaluation(7 posts)→
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