Programming is becoming unrecognizable. Karpathy draws attention again to the famous November-December 2025 inflection point.
It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December.
He was able to get his agent (most likely his claw) to build a local video analysis dashboard in ~30 minutes
I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes. [...] As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable.
He says that the "biggest prize" is being able to set up Claws well enough that it can handle multiple Code instances for you
The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now.
I am currently still operating at the LLM agent layer. I did setup Jacho but given that his brain is powered by GLM 4.7, he isn't that smart of a claw. I'm considering birthing a new claw and plugging its brain to Gemini soon. I'll be more meticulous this time with its setup so that it can "productively manage multiple parallel Code instances" for me.
He points out that while its not perfect yet, the key is figuring out which parts to delegate to AI to be fully autonomous and which ones to be more involved in.
The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.
at the top tiers, deep technical expertise may be even more of a multiplier than before because of the added leverage.