Legendary Coder Confesses to Writing Code Mostly by Asking AI in English
KEY POINTS
- â˘In late January 2026, Andrej Karpathy shared notes about his heavy reliance on AI coding agents like Anthropic's Claude Code.
- â˘By December 2025, he flipped from 80% manual coding to 80% AI-assisted agent coding, admitting his skills are atrophying.
- â˘Engineers from xAI and Anthropic echoed his experiences, noting that some havenât manually edited code in over two months.
Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's former AI top dog and one-time OpenAI founding member, publicly sheepishly admits in January 2026 that he codes 80% by whispering instructions to AI agents like Claude Code and Codex â flipping his old manual keyboard warrior ratio on its head since November 2025. He calls this surreal new dance 'vibe coding,' which somehow snagged Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year, proving dictionaries are finally ready to accept 'coding means bossing chatbots.' Karpathy even notices his hard-earned CS manual coding skills atrophying as he increasingly trusts AI to do his homework, but hey, egoâs a small price for crunching code with a digital sidekick. Anthropic and xAI engineers joined the choir, confessing their own AI copilots, with some using AI so hardcore they haven't touched a line of code in months. The AI, despite occasionally littering code with dead branches like a digital hoarder, now even reviews its own messy work, because corporate AI has learned to mansplain to itself.
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Andrej Karpathy just modernified coding: now itâs less keyboard banging and more English whispering to clever robot interns. Manual skill atrophy hit faster than potato batteries died in science class.
When your best coder admits fading manual skills because AI bosses him around in English, 'Ctrl+Alt+Del' becomes 'Please write this,' the future is terrifyingly poetic.
So software engineers are basically just royal managers barking orders at robot minions now. Describe the death of 'old school coding' in one sentence? This is it.
Source: Businessinsider | Published: 1/29/2026 | Author: Henry Chandonnet
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