Karpathy Hasn't Written a Line of Code Since December, Says He's in a 'State of Psychosis'

Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI cofounder and former Tesla AI director, revealed in a No Priors podcast interview on Friday that he hasn't written a single line of code since December 2025 — and admitted the shift has left him in what he calls a "state of psychosis."

A Complete Reversal

The transformation happened fast. Just months ago, Karpathy handled 80% of his coding work himself, delegating only 20% to AI agents. That ratio has now completely flipped: agents handle 80% while he provides oversight for the remaining 20%.

"I don't think I've typed like a line of code probably since December, basically, which is an extremely large change," Karpathy said during the interview.

The December Threshold

Karpathy pinpointed December 2025 as the exact moment AI coding agents crossed from unreliable to genuinely functional. Before that month, agents "basically didn't work" on complex tasks. After it, they gained the ability to power through multi-step projects without losing context — what Karpathy describes as "tenacity."

He offered a striking example: a task involving SSH setup, model benchmarking, dashboard building, and service configuration that would have consumed an entire weekend just three months earlier. With current AI agents, it took roughly 30 minutes with zero human intervention.

"All of this could easily have been a weekend project just three months ago. Today it's something you kick off and forget about," he said.

The 'Psychosis' of Possibility

Despite the productivity gains, Karpathy expressed unease. He described experiencing a kind of "psychosis" — not a clinical condition, but an overwhelming sense of trying to comprehend what's now possible with advancing AI technology. He said he's nervous about not being at the forefront of developments, watching others experiment with promising applications on social media.

"I want to be at the forefront of it," he said.

From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering

Karpathy, who popularized the term "vibe coding" exactly one year ago, now considers the concept outdated. He has since coined a new term: "agentic engineering" — emphasizing that while AI does the implementation, humans still own the architecture, quality, and correctness.

"Agentic, because the new default is that you are not writing the code directly 99% of the time, you are orchestrating agents who do and acting as oversight — engineering, to emphasize that there is an art and science and expertise to it," Karpathy explained.

Real-World Impact Beyond Code

Karpathy isn't just using AI agents for programming. He described "Dobby the House Elf," an AI agent that controls his home's sound, lighting, security, shades, HVAC, pool, and spa through WhatsApp messages. Where each system previously required its own app, Dobby unifies them with natural language commands and even alerts him when delivery trucks arrive.

Industry-Wide Shift

The transformation extends well beyond one researcher's workflow. At Uber, an internal AI agent now generates approximately 1,800 code changes weekly, pushing AI-driven modifications from under 1% to 8% of total changes. Goldman Sachs valued the AI coding market at $45 billion in 2025, with startups adopting these tools 20% more frequently than large enterprises.

However, concerns persist. Production engineers report that debugging AI-generated code takes three times longer than human-written code, and governance frameworks for autonomous code generation remain almost nonexistent.

What It Means

Karpathy argues that deep technical expertise may be even more valuable in this new era, not less. "At the top tiers, deep technical expertise may be even more of a multiplier than before," he noted — suggesting that the ability to precisely decompose complex tasks and evaluate AI output separates effective practitioners from the rest.

For the millions of developers worldwide, the message is clear: the tools have changed, the workflow has changed, but engineering judgment remains irreplaceable.

Source: Fortune