Tesla's Former AI Director Andrej Karpathy Who Said He Feels Behind As Programmer Now Says Software Programming Has Changed Due To... Karpathy says programmers now manage AI agents instead of writing code line by line This is a sharp evolution from the man who coined "vibe coding" just last year, where he described casually prompting AI and barely reviewing the output. That was fun for throwaway projects, he'd said at the time. Now, Karpathy is talking about something far more structured—spinning up AI agents, assigning tasks in plain English, and reviewing their work in parallel. "You're not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over," he wrote. The post comes weeks after Karpathy admitted he'd "never felt this much behind as a programmer," describing the profession as being "dramatically refactored." He spoke of needing to master a new layer of abstraction involving agents, subagents, prompts, memory modes, and MCP protocols—all while the underlying AI models keep changing. AI coding productivity still a mixed bag despite industry hype Not everyone's sold on the revolution, though. A METR study from July found AI assistants actually decreased experienced developers' productivity by 19%. Bain & Company called programming productivity gains "unremarkable." Yet Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said AI writes over 30% of new code at Google, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claimed Claude was behind 90% of the company's code. Karpathy, for his part, isn't calling it magic. "It needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas," he wrote. But the leverage, he believes, is already enormous—and only growing.#andrej_karpathy #metr_study #sundar_pichai #dario_amodei #ai_coding
