>Around the same time, Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI cofounder, former Tesla AI lead) told the No Priors podcast he was in a “state of psychosis” over AI agents. He said he hadn’t written a line of code since December. He described tasks that used to take a weekend now finishing in 30 minutes with zero human intervention. Karpathy is a literal genius and one of the most technically accomplished people in the industry. He built a WhatsApp bot called “Dobby the House Elf” to control his home systems (though that naming leans more towards genius than psychosis).

Ah yes, the same guy that said implementing lidar with cameras is hard (like Kalman filters aren't a thing). Same guy who spoke positively about Musks engineering talents AFTER he went crazy. That genius...

Basically, I feel like if you are suffering from psychosis, your talent is measured by how much stuff you have memorized, and how much of it you can type on keyboard in a given timeframe. And now that LLMs are doing it for you, you feel worthless.

I remember when I first started learning python, having been in Java/C++ land. It felt like a hack. You could just pip install stuff, import it, dynamically hack things around if you needed to, and make stuff work in much shorter time. I wrote tools that let me write other tools quicker. For example, back before you could ask LLMs to write code, you basically had to google stuff and search for examples. So one of the first things I wrote was essentially web page to api converter. Now I had a tool that programmatically let me pull content from web, which included things like code samples.

I then wrote a tool to search documentation and github, and pull things that were styled as code, using my previous tool, and put them into opensearch, so when i had a question about something, I could search a function in opensearch and see examples.

E.t.c and so on.

Agents these days have replaced a lot of the manual work. But complex tasks, with decision making, repeat loops, and unknown unknowns is still something that agents cant reliably do. Anyone can put together a UI with agents very quickly. But then, if you leave a lot of stuff to the agents and not specify how you want the code written, you are going to get bounded into code that is going to quickly degrade performance, introduce edge case bugs, and so on. Sure, you can have llms fix all that, but to do that automatically is something nobody has done yet.

The real skill in the future is going to be writing agentic programs to work on features for you instead of working on features. You invest time up front to do this, and spend minimal time maintaining. Much in the same way that you invested time into writing OOP code with clean separation in packages and classes, build systems with verification, all so that anyone can come in and write code and have a safe way of testing and committing changes.