Andrej Karpathy on the Evolving Programmer Landscape
Original Post
Andrej Karpathy @karpathy
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.
6:36 PM · Dec 26, 2025 · 16M Views
Replies
Boris Cherny @bcherny · Dec 26, 2025
I feel this way most weeks tbh. Sometimes I start approaching a problem manually, and have to remind myself “claude can probably do this”. Recently we were debugging a memory leak in Claude Code, and I started approaching it the old fashioned way: connecting a profiler, using theShow more
Andrej Karpathy @karpathy · Dec 26, 2025
I have similar experiences. You point the thing around and it shoots pellets or sometimes even misfires and then once in a while when you hold it just right a powerful beam of laser erupts and melts your problem.
Yuchen Jin @Yuchenj_UW · Dec 26, 2025
AI didn’t replace programmers. It replaced the programming language.
Relevant People
- Andrej Karpathy @karpathy: Building @EurekaLabsAI. Previously Director of AI @ Tesla, founding team @ OpenAI, CS231n/PhD @ Stanford. I like to train large deep neural nets.
My Notes / Thoughts:
I think that indeed currently we are in a time where a lot of progress is being made and a lot of new things are being born. However, I also think that eventually in the future there will come a time again where things are mostly static and not progressing as much anymore. But well currently is a time of change.