Andrej Karpathy — founding member of OpenAI, former head of AI at Tesla — posted what he called "random notes" on coding with Claude. They're not random. They're one of the most grounded practitioner assessments of what's happening to software engineering. Today: the gains, the failure modes, the transformations, and the shadows.
In this episode:
- The 80/20 flip: from manual coding to agent coding in one month
- Tenacity as revelation: "stamina is a core bottleneck to work"
- The fun paradox: why coding feels more enjoyable, not less
- The failure catalogue: sycophancy, bloat, and "slightly sloppy junior dev" as mental model
- Atrophy: generation vs discrimination, and what it means for learning
- Slopacolypse: bracing for 2026
- The open questions: 10X engineers, generalists vs specialists, StarCraft or Factorio or music?
Links:
- Andrej Karpathy's post on X
- Referenced: EP001 The Day After Davos, EP003 The Dumbest Smart Technique in AI
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🦋 X: @_about_claude
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