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Karpathy on Programming: "I've never felt this much behind"

Karpathy on Programming: "I've never felt this much behind"

rishabhaiover

Comments (360)

  • rambojohnson
    What exhausts me isn’t “falling behind.” It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore.This agentic arms race by C-suite know-nothings feels less like leverage and more like denial. We took a stochastic text generator, noticed it lies confidently, wipes entire databases and harddrives, and responded by wrapping it in managers, sub-agents, memories, tools, permissions, workflows, and orchestration layers so we don’t have to look directly at the fact that it still doesn’t understand anything.Now we’re expected to maintain a mental model not just of our system, but of a swarm of half-reliable interns talking to each other in a language that isn’t executable, reproducible, or stable.Work now feels duller than dishwater, enough to have forced me to career pivot for 2026.
  • hamstergene
    I feel like many people in the comments aren't aware that Karpathy is an ML scientist for whom programming is a complementary skill, not a profession. The only reason he came up with "vibe coding" is because maximum complexity of his hobby projects made it seem believable. Maybe take his opinions about fate of programming with a grain of salt.He is brilliant no doubt, but not in that field.
  • robotresearcher
    Andrej is 39 years old, according to Wikipedia.Douglas Adams on age and relating to technology:"1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things."From 'The Salmon of Doubt' (2002)
  • halfmatthalfcat
    Wow - can we coin "Slopbrain" for people who are so far gone into AI eventualism that they can no longer function? Liked "cooked" but "slopped" or something. Good grief lol. Talk about getting lost in the sauce...
  • flumpcakes
    > There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and ...This sounds unbearable. It doesn't sound like software development, it sounds like spending a thousand hours tinkering with your vim config. It reminds me of the insane patchwork of sprawl you often get in DevOps - but now brought to your local machine.I honestly don't see the upside, or how it's supposed to make any programmer worth their weight in salt 10x better.
  • brandonmenc
    I admit to pangs of this, but it's really never made any sense because the implication is that the profession is now magically closed off to newcomers.Imagine someone in the 90s saying "if you don't master the web NOW you will be forever behind!" and yet 20 years later kids who weren't even born then are building web apps and frameworks.Waiting for it to all shake out and "mastering" it then is still a strategy. The only thing you'll sacrifice is an AI funding lottery ticket.
  • zmmmmm
    Definitely don't hang out on Hacker News then. It's absolutely the worst place for imposter syndrome or people with any kind of skill inferiority anxiety or confidence issue. Half the reason I read HN is because the anxiety it induces is moderately constructive in motivating me to ensure I keep learning and stay up to date. But I definitely come away every day with a distinct impression I'm below baseline in skill and knowledge for my field, even though within my own circles I'm considered expert by all my peers.
  • Aldipower
    I am a software developer and mainly a programmer for decades now. I love programming. I love to be "once" with the computer. I will never give this joy up. If I need to sell shoes at daytime, I will program real computer programs in the evenings. If it won't be possible with modern machinery anymore, I will take my Commodore 64. I am a free man.Edit: Corrected since/for. :-)
  • superze
    As an Opus user, I genuinely don’t understand how someone can work for weeks or months without regularly opening an IDE. The output almost always fails.I repeatedly rewrite prompts, restate the same constraints, and write detailed acceptance criteria, yet still end up with broken or non-functional code.its very frustrating to say the least Yesterday alone I spent about $200 on generations that now require significant manual rewrites just to make them work.At that point, the gains are questionable. My biggest success is having the model take over the first Design in my app and I take it from there, but those hundred lines if not thousand lines of code it generates are so Messi, it's insanely painful to refactor the mess afterwards
  • justatdotin
    I think it's mistaken to think in terms of 'falling behind' or 'catching up'I've seen that these tools have different uses for different devs. I know on my current team, each of us devs works very differently to one another, and we make significant allowances to accommodate for one another's different styles. Certain tasks always go to certain devs; one dev is like a steel trap, another is the chaos explorer, another's a beginner, another has great big-picture perspective, etc. (not sure why but there's even space for myself ;)In the same way, different devs use these powerful tools in very different ways. So don't imagine you're falling behind, because the only useful benchmark is yourself. And don't imagine you can wait for consensus: you'll still need to identify your personal relationship to the tools.Most of all, don't be discouraged. Even if you never embrace these tools, there will remain space for your skills and your style of approaching our shared work.Give it another 10 years and I'm sure this will all become clearer...
  • reconnecting
    > OpenAI's sales and marketing expenses increased to _$2 billion_ in the first half of 2025.Looks like AI companies spend enough on marketing budgets to create the illusion that AI makes development better.Let's wait one more year, and perhaps everyone who didn't fall victim to these "slimming pills” for developers' brains will be glad about the choice they made.
  • Animats
    I feel that way, too."Vibe programming" is less than a year old. What is programming going to look like in a few years?
  • finolex1
    Is there anything substantial in his list ("agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations") that Claude Code or Cursor don't already incorporate?I empathize with his sense that if we could just provide the right context and development harness to an AI model, we could be *that* much more productive, but it might just be misplaced hope. Claude Code and Cursor are probably not that far from the current frontier for LLM development environments.
  • BhavdeepSethi
    Most of the folks that are talking about this are the ones who work independently and work on greenfield projects (especially tooling related). The cost of making a mistake there is so low. I've used it similarly and it's absolutely amazing. Though I still use a mix of agents and code myself in my regular 9-5 job.I've yet to see examples of folks using this in a team of 4+ folks working together in a production env with users, and just using AI for their regular development.Claude code creator only using claude code doesn't count. That's more like dog-fooding.
  • gghffguhvc
    My company takes between Christmas and New Years off. I took a week before that off too. I have not used AI in that time. The slower pace of life is amazing. But when I get back to coding it will be back to running at 180%. It’s the new norm. However I’ve decided to take longer “no computer” breaks in my day. I have to adapt but I need to defend my “take it slow” times and find some analogue hobbies. The shift is real and you can’t wind it back.
  • PaulDavisThe1st
    He should join the Ardour project. Or go to work for Ableton or Bitwig or Presonus or Digidesign or MOTU or any other DAW manufacturer. Or any video or image editing application. Or get involved with more or less any complex, "creative" native desktop application.All of the stuff he feels he is falling behind on? Almost completely irrelevant in our domain.
  • presentation
    Anything sufficiently useful will be productized and packaged up by somebody out there so that the masses can use it, the rest will be niche and only relevant for the most hardcore enthusiasts, so I’m not so worried.
  • xzkll
    Does any of you bother the fact that now you have to pay money in order to do your job? I mean AI model subscriptions. Somehow it feels wrong for me to pay for tools that are trying to replace me.
  • bmitch3020
  • sureglymop
    > strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineeringSounds fever dreamish. Thank you sincerely (not) for creating it!
  • nineteen999
    I'm actually having more fun than I've had in years with this, since I've mainly focussed on my personal projects while getting the hang of what's achievable. And it turns out to be quite a lot if you're a creative thinker.At first it kind of depressed me, but now I realised that actually writing code is only part of my day job, the rest is integrating infrastructure and managing people and enabling them to do their job as well, and if I can do the coding/integration part faster and give them better tools more quickly, that's a huge win.This means I can spend more time at the beach and on my physical and mental well being as well. I was stubborn and skeptical a year ago, but now I'm just really enjoying the process of learning new things.
  • clejack
    For the folks who have more positive outlooks how often do you change your code after it's been generated?I haven't used agents much for coding, but I noticed that when I do have something created with the slightest complexity, it's never perfect and I have to go back and change it. This is mostly fine, but when large chunks of code are created, I don't have much context for editing things manually.It's like waking up in a new house that you've never seen before. Sure I recognize the type of rooms, the furniture, the outlets, appliances, plumbing, and so on when I see them; but my sense of orientation is strained.This is my main issue at the moment.
  • rishabhaiover
    For the longest time, the joy of creation in programming came from solving hard problems. The pursuit of a challenge meant something. Now, that pursuit seems to be short-circuited by an animated being racing ahead under a different set of incentives. I see a tsunami at the beach, and I’m not sure whether I can run fast enough.
  • anon
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  • gaigalas
    > Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manualUsing tools before their manual exists is the oldest human trick, not the newest.
  • paxys
    I have never felt this much ahead as a programmer. So many developers I see, including at my workplace, are blindly prompting models hoping to solve their problem and failing every step of the way. The people who truly understand what is happening are still in the ruling class, and their skills are not going to be irrelevant anytime soon.
  • anon
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  • deadbabe
    I think this is mostly a frontend sentiment.In the backend, we're mostly just pushing data around from one place to another. Not much changes, there's only a few ways to really do that. Your data structures change, but ultimately the work is the same. You don't even really need an LLM at all, or super complex frameworks and ORMs, etc.
  • xg15
    And there it is again, the "powerful alien tool" that was just "handed to us".No decades of research and massive allocation of resources over the last few years as well as very intentional decision making by tech leadership to develop this specific technology.Nope, it just mysteriously dropped from the sky one day.
  • albert_e
    I can attest to one thing that has grown 10x for sure -- FOMO.
  • anon
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  • 1970-01-01
    I love that Agile and Scrum is still unmentioned. Can we stick a fork in it yet?
  • PaulHoule
    I don't have a lot of patience for this sort of take because my north star is project management and in my normal moving forward model I work in milestones where I stack up my tools and get something specific done and screwing around with tools is heavily timeboxed. If A.I. tools help me make progress great, if they don't, I will fall back to manual methods, get that phase of work done or (rarely) give up on the subproject. After I get some distance from it I can consolidate my learnings, try a different approach.It's death though to be excessively reading tweets and blogs about this stuff, this will have you exhausted before you even try a real project and comparing yourself to other people's claims which are sometimes lies, often delusional, ungrounded and almost always self-serving. In sofar someone is getting things done with any consistency they are practicing basic PM, treating feelings of exhaustion, ungroundedness and especially going in circles as a sign to regroup, slow down and focus on the end you have in mind.If the point really is to research tools than what you do is break down that work into attainable chunks, the way you break down any other kind of work.
  • 6thbit
    Sounds to me like Karapathy is in the "valley of despair" of the Dunning-Kruger effect of AI tools.He knows the tools, he's efficient with them and yet he just now understands how much he's unable to harness at this point that makes him feel left behind.Looking forward to see what comes out of him climbing that slope.
  • design2203
    I’m convinced much of this is all noise - people seem to be focusing on the wrong unit of analysis. Producing software and lots of it has never been a problem - coming up with the right projects and producing a vertically differentiated product to what already exists is.
  • timcobb
    whaaaat and this is the guy who coined "vibe-coding"? I am honestly pretty shocked reading this. I must be a fool or an idiot or both because I, for one, feel like suddenly I went from being a 1x developer to a 10x developer. Maybe 10x folks like Karpathy have it the opposite way?
  • davesque
    Honestly surprised at this take by him. For one, feels like exaggeration. For two, are these tools really that hard to use?
  • bgwalter
    This is from the man who has no finished open source projects and who recommended camera-only FSD to Tesla, which he also did not finish.The actually productive programmers, who wrote the stack that powers the economy before and after 2023 need not listen to these cheap commercials.
  • alphazard
    The thing that always trips me up is the lack of isolation/sandboxing that all of the AI programming tools provide. I want to orchestrate a workforce of agents, but they can't be trusted not to run amok.Does anyone have a better way to do this other than spinning up a cloud VM to run goose or claude or whatever poorly isolated agent tool?
  • tjr
    Being a nondeterministic tool, the output for a given input can vary. Rather than having a solid plan of, "if I provide this input, then that will happen", it's more like, "if I do something like this, I can expect something like that, probably, and if not, then try again until it works, I suppose".What are the productivity gains? Obviously, it must vary. The quality of the tool output varies based on numerous criteria, including what programming language is being used and what problem is trying to be solved. The fact that person A gets a 10x productivity increase on their project does not mean that person B will also get a 10x productivity increase on their project, no matter how well they use the tool.But again, tool usage itself is variable. Person A themselves might get a 10x boost one time, and 8x another time, and 4x another time, and 2x another time.
  • tehjoker
    The person saying this has a financial interest in saying so.
  • leecommamichael
    Mind you he is in the industry, and founding a company whose success depends on this stuff.
  • LogicFailsMe
    Countdown to his youtube course explaining it all for beginners commences...
  • anon
    undefined
  • ekropotin
    If Karpathy feels behind, imaging how we, regular folks feel
  • ciconia
    I for one am not using AI, will not touch that steaming pile of manure with a 10 yard stick, and I couldn't care less about the so called magnitude 9 earthquake. When this bubble finally bursts into nothingness, I'll be still here practicing my craft and providing real value for my clients.
  • anon
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  • cherry_tree
    Behind who?Is there someone already mastering “agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering” ?And do they have a blog?
  • nen-nomad
    Claude Code didn’t make me faster. It changed the calendar. What used to take me months now takes weeks. Work didn't vanished, the friction did.Two years ago I was a human USB cable: copy, paste, pray. IDE <-> chat window, piece by piece. Now the loop is tighter. The distance is shorter.There’s still hand-holding. Still judgment. Still cleanup. But the shift is real.We’ve come a long way. And we’re not done.
  • lo_zamoyski
    If you want to chase the mob off the cliff, go ahead. Insanity and stupidity aren't sound life strategies, though. They're a sign you have lost the plot.
  • wordsaboutcode
    i know how he feels :/
  • dude250711
    Man, this is giving me a cognitive dissonance compared to my experiences.Actually, even the post itself reads like a cognitive dissonance with a dash of the usual "if it's not working for you then you are using it wrong" defence.
  • ldng
    Yeah. OR. You just ignore the bullshit until the bubble burst. Then we'll see what's left and it will not be what the majority think.
  • dnw
    I have been using Copilot, Cursor, then CC for a little more than a year now. I have written code with teams using these tools and I am writing mostly for myself now. My observations have been the following:1) These tools obviously improved significantly over the past 12 months. They can churn out code that makes sense in the context of the codebase, meaning there is more grounding to the codebase they are working on as opposed to codebases they have been trained on.2) On the surface they are pretty good at solving known problems. You are not going to make them write well-optimized renderer or an RL algorithm but they can write run-of-the-mill business logic better _and_ faster than I can-- if you optimize for both speed of production and quality.3) Out of the box, their personality is to just solve the problem in front of them as quickly as possible and move on. This leads them to make suboptimal decisions (e.g. solving a deadlock by sleeping for 2 seconds, CC Opus 4.5 just last night). This personality can be altered with appropriate guidance. For example, a shortcut I use is to append "idiomatic" to my request-- "come up with an idiomatic solution" or "is that the most idiomatic solution we can think of." Similarly when writing tests or reviewing tests I use "intent of the function under test" which makes the model output better solution or code.4) These models, esp. Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2, are remarkable bug hunters. I can point at a symptom and they come away with the bug. I then ask them to explain me why the bug happens and I follow the code to see if it's true. I have not come across a bad bug, yet. They can find deadlocks and starvations, you then have to guide them to a good fix (see #3).5) Code quality is not sufficient to create product quality, but it is often necessary to sustain it. Sustainability window is shorter nowadays. Therefore, more than ever, quality of the code matters. I can see Claude Code slowly degrading in quality every single day--and I use it every single day for many hours. As much as it pains me to say this, compared to Opencode, Amp, and Toad I can feel the "slop" in Claude Code. I would love to study the codebases of these tools overtime to measure their quality--I know it's possible for all but Claude Code.6) I used to worry I don't have a good mental model of the software I build. Much like journaling, I think there is something to be said about the process of writing/making actually gives you a very precise mental model. However, I have been trying to let that go and use the model as a tool to query and develop the mental model post facto. It's not the same but I think it is going to be the new norm. We need tooling in this space.7) Despite your own experiences with these tools it is imperative that they be in your toolbox. If you have abstained from them thus far, perhaps best way to get them incorporated is by starting to use them for attending to your toil.8) You can still handcraft code. There is so much fun, beauty and pleasure it in to deny doing it. Don't expect this to be your job. This is your passion.
  • globular-toast
    I don't usually post something like this, but this is so fucking stupid. I'm prepared to stand by that. Let's see in a few years if I'm right."AI" is literally models trained to make you think it's intelligent. That's it. It's like the ultimate "algorithm" or addiction machine. It's trained to make you think it's amazing and magical and therefore you think it's amazing and magical.
  • oakpond
    > There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering.Slop-oriented programming
  • alexcos
    "I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind."
  • sora2video
    [dead]
  • breve
    [flagged]
  • thomasfromcdnjs
    I have been telling everybody I know over the Christmas break that I have been coding from around 10-36 years of age, as a career and always in my spare time as a hobby. I have a lacklustre computer science knowledge and never worked at the scale of FANG etc but am still rather confident in my understanding of code and the tech scene in general. I've been telling people I haven't "coded" for almost 6 months now, I only interface with agentic setups and only open my IDE to make copy and config changes.I understand we are all in different camps for a multitude of reasons;- The jouissance of rote coding and abstraction- The tree of knowledge specifically in programming, and which branches and nodes we each currently sit at in our understanding- Technical paradigms that humans may have argued about have now shifted to obvious answers for agentic harnesses (think something like TDD, I for one barely used that as a style because I've mostly worked in startups building apps and found the cost of my labour not worth it, but agentic harnesse loops absolutely excel at it)- The geography and size of the markets we work in- The complexity of the subject matter / domain expertise- The cost prohibitive nature of token based programming (not everyone can afford it, and the big fish seemingly have quite the advantage going fourth)- Agentic coding has proven it can build UI's very easily, and depending on experience, it can build a very very many things easily. it excels in having feedback loops such as linting or simple javascript errors, which are observability problems in my opinion. Once it can do full stack observability (APM, system, network), it's ability to reason and correct problems on the fly for any complex system seems overly easy from my purvue.- At the human nature level, some individuals prefer to think in 0's and 1's, some in words, some inbetween, and so on, what type of communication do agentic setups prefer?With some of that above intuition that is easily up for debate, I've decided to lean 100% into agentic coding, I think it will be absolutely everywhere and obviously with humans in the loop but I don't think humans will need to review the pull requests. I am personally treating it as an existential threat to my career after having seen enough of what it's capable of. (with some imagination and a bit of a gambling spirit, as us mere mortals surely can't predict the future)With my gambit, I'm not choosing to exit the tech scene and instead optimistically investing my mental prowess into figuring out where "humans in the loop" will be positioned. Currently I'm looking into CI level tooling, the known being code quality, and all the various forms of software testing paradigms. The emerging evals in my mind will keep evolving and beyond testing our ideas of model intelligence and chat bot responses will do a lot more.---A more practical rant: If you are building a recommendation engine for A and B, the engine could have X amount of modules that return a score which when all combined make up the final decision between A and B. Forgive me but let's just use dating as an example. A product manager would say we need a new module to calculate relevance between A and B based off their food preferences. An agentic harness can easily code that module and create the tests for it. The product manager could ask an LLM to make a list of 1000 reasons why two people might be suitable for dating. The agent could easily go away and code and test all those modules and probably maintain technical consistency but drift from the companies philosophical business model. I am looking into building "semantic linting" for codebases, how can the agent maintain the code so it aligns with the company's business model. And if for whatever reason those 1000 modules need to be refactored, how can the agent maintain the code so it aligns with the company's business model. Essentially trying to make a feedback loop between the companies needs and the code itself. To stop the agent and the business from drifting in either directions, and allowing for automatic feedback loops for the agent to fix them. In short, I think there will be new tools invented that us human's will be mastering as to Karpathy's point.