In October 2025, AI developer Andrej Karpathy dismissed AI agents, saying "they just don't work." Three months later, he's reversed course.
In a detailed post on X, former OpenAI and Tesla AI researcher Andrej Karpathy describes a fundamental shift in how he works. In just a few weeks, he went from about 80 percent manual coding and 20 percent agent usage in November to the exact opposite in December: 80 percent agent, 20 percent manual edits.
"I really am mostly programming in English now, a bit sheepishly telling the LLM what code to write... in words," Karpathy writes. While this "hurts the ego a bit," the ability to edit software in large "code actions" is simply too useful to ignore.
For Karpathy, this represents the biggest change to his coding workflow in roughly two decades of programming. He suspects something similar is happening right now to a double-digit percentage of engineers, while awareness among the public remains in the low single digits.
AI models still make mistakes like "a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev"
