Andrej Karpathy says programming is "unrecognizable" now that AI agents actually work

Andrej Karpathy, former AI developer at Tesla and OpenAI, says programming with AI agents has changed fundamentally over the past two months. According to Karpathy, AI agents barely worked before December 2026, but since then they've become reliable, thanks to higher model quality and the ability to stay on task for longer stretches.

As an example, he describes how an AI agent independently built a video analysis dashboard over a weekend: he typed the task in plain English, the agent worked for 30 minutes, solved problems on its own, and delivered a finished result. Three months ago, that would have been an entire weekend project, Karpathy says.

As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks in English and managing and reviewing their work in parallel.