Andrej Karpathy said he's never felt more behind as a programmer. Let that sink in for a second.
After December 2025, agentic workflows just worked—and Karpathy's app became obsolete.
Deep Dive
A recent talk reveals a seismic shift: agentic workflows became reliably useful around December 2025. He built MenuGen to photograph restaurant menus, then saw a single multimodal prompt solve the same problem. Now he distinguishes "vibe coding" (AI raises the floor) from
Key Points
- December 2025 was a sudden turning point where agentic workflows became reliably useful, catching many developers off guard.
- Karpathy's MenuGen app was rendered obsolete by a single multimodal AI prompt, leading him to declare it 'shouldn't exist.'
- He distinguishes 'vibe coding' (raising the floor for all) from 'agentic engineering' (maintaining quality for professionals), and cites the jagged intelligence paradox where AI excels at complex tasks but fails at simple real-world reasoning.
Why It Matters
Developers must now prioritize understanding over mere coding speed—outsourcing thinking is possible, but not understanding.