AI coding agents made a huge leap forward since December, completing complex projects with minimal oversight, meaning “programming is becoming unrecognizable”
It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the …
@karpathyAndrej Karpathy
Context & Ripple Effects
Earlier coverage traced the path from AlphaCode’s competitive-level program-writing claim to a faster cycle of AI product releases. This report marks a more consequential threshold: agents are being described as capable of carrying work across a project rather than merely assisting with isolated coding tasks.
Development teams can delegate larger, bounded projects to agents, shifting human effort toward specifying work, integrating systems, and accepting results.
Individual developers gain more implementation leverage, while responsibility for validating agent-produced code remains concentrated with the people and teams deploying it.
Second-order effects
As output rises, review, testing, and security functions become the immediate constraint; organizations must assess more code than traditional human-authored workflows were designed to handle.
Coding-tool competition shifts beyond code completion toward dependable end-to-end execution and workflows that help teams inspect and govern generated changes.
Third-order effects
If this capability holds across real-world projects, software development could reorganize around a smaller amount of manual implementation and a larger premium on system design, verification, and operational accountability.
The durable industry divide may be between organizations that can safely absorb agent-generated output into their engineering processes and those whose assurance practices become the bottleneck.
The trend: AI is moving from an in-workflow coding assistant toward an embedded agent that can execute larger units of professional work under human direction.
I'm seeing Chart 1 below being shared widely, suggesting the possibility that software programming jobs are booming as vibe coding gets cheaper. Hey, look, maybe. But zoom out a bit. Chart 2 is the 4 year history of software jobs. Huge boom, big bust, teeny bounce back. [image]
Very little about software engineering has changed over past last three months. A great deal has changed about coding, not unlike when we saw the rise of high order programming languages and compilers, the difference today being that the number of developers is far larger and
Software engineering changed more in the last 3 months than the preceeding 30 years. Everything about running a software company needs to be rethought from first principles.
I promise you, if you rethink software eng from first principles, you will NOT arrive at the vibe coding slop generation we're in... unless your principles are really just capitalism and not engineering.
At this point, “agentic engineering” has allowed me to build the best AI harness I could possibly get my hands on. Yes, I vibe coded it. That's right. You don't need to wait around for the features you need for your AI agents. Please don't. You could just build them yourself.
It _is_ business as usual. You know why? We haven't been flooded with amazing new apps, tools or workspaces. Just a wordcel machine spamming code based off all the bad ideas most programmers had before, with all the ambition of a rock sitting at the bottom of a pond. The only
“Hey Claude, can you market, find customers, run PoCs, convince stakeholders, negotiate budgets, go through procurement, and close this PO for me?” Yeah, that doesn't work and that's the vast majority of what it takes to run a company, not having 194 agents banging out thousands
“Programming is becoming unrecognizable. You're not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over.” As Steve Jobs said, “Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra.” We don't write code anymore. We
In my views ... To really benefit from AI generated code, you need to understand code better than the AI does. If you don't you might copy whatever it gives you but you won't grow as a developer. You'll end up producing messy work and not improving your skills. The good news
Programming will never be the same... 🤯 Karpathy gave an agent one sentence. 30 min later... SSH set up, vLLM running, endpoints live, web UI built. He didn't touch anything. This is the new normal now.
Yup. I feel this in my bones. Classical Software Engineering is over, period. It's very weird, and it's honestly a hard thing to ‘tell people’ about. You can't just tell people, they gotta feel it. I tried to step back and actually write down some thoughts about this all. Maybe
in december I experienced a vivid realization of this and decided to immediately pivot my career because of it it was a distinct feeling, specifically after building with opus 4.6 + codex 5.2, that everything was going to be “different”
I love Karpathy's posts because they're so on point. He's not only a leading expert in his field, but he also manages to capture the zeitgeist with his statements. But this post is particularly impactful. Since December, (agentic) coding has undergone a significant
I never tried to build anything with AI coding before this weekend and now I've bought three domains and am working on like 7 small projects that I've been dreaming about for years (!!) And they work! I'm speechless honestly And I'm a stupid peon with seriously limited
WAT “Anthropic is the fastest growing company of all time adding $4.5B run rate in 42 days after the $380B round.” “OpenRouter grew 2.5x in 1.5 months. On track to 1 quadrillion token annual run rate.”
This is counterintuitive for some, which is why there's a paradox named after it. But if you lower the cost of something that was previously supply constrained, demand for that thing goes up. Software engineering is just one of the easiest examples to contemplate. The process
Proof below that anyone with ideas can be a builder now. @Replit has empowered me and millions like me to put our ideas to work. This is just the beginning. So much more in store 4 all of us builders soon! [image]
I experienced a very similar transition in December. However, for higher-complexity tasks (ML-related), we are still not there yet. Two days ago I had GPT-5.2-PRO-ET and DeepThink argue for hours, converge, be happy, yet they missed a very obvious math issue. Still a huge unlock
4w ago I was a Claude Code skeptic. I'm not a coder. None of the use cases were relevant. I managed teams & projects, drowning in email & overdue reminders. So I tried creating tools that would help me and... holy crap. Now I'm sharing the tools I built: https://claudeblattman.co…
claude just cleaned my repos, rewrote all my scripts and ran them itself good thing is i didn't do anything wrong and all the results still hold, it just improved inference incredible, best 100 euros I've ever spent
My carpenter told me he's now nailing a thousand nails an hour with his new nail gun. He still hasn't built the in-law unit but at least now he's using a lot of nails.
An experienced programmer told me he's now using AI to generate a thousand lines of code an hour. When I posted a similar stat 6 months ago, I got about a 50-50 mix of indignant disbelief and “Yeah, me too.” I'm curious if the split will be different this time.
AI agents have caused a sea change in programming, going from hype to reality last December. — That Claude takes English instructions to build apps, configure settings, and self-correct errors is magical to behold. It's easy to dismiss without trying the latest models, but cod…