Perhaps we have already passed through the singularity, but most people haven't noticed it

Andrej Karpathy, a leading AI researcher and former director of AI at Tesla and OpenAI, made a startling revelation on the No Priors podcast: he has completely stopped writing code. Since December 2023, Karpathy hasn't authored a single line of traditional programming, marking a dramatic shift from his previous workflow where he personally wrote roughly 80% of his code. Instead, he now spends up to 16 hours per day in a new paradigm—orchestrating and directing teams of AI agents to perform tasks that previously required manual coding.

This profound change in his daily work has led Karpathy to describe his current state as living in 'perpetual AI psychosis.' The term reflects the disorienting yet exhilarating experience of working with AI systems whose capabilities feel effectively infinite, fundamentally altering what's possible in software development and problem-solving. Karpathy's experience suggests we may have already passed a significant threshold in AI adoption where the most advanced practitioners have transitioned from being coders to becoming AI conductors and strategists.

Karpathy's comments have gone viral because they come from one of the world's most respected AI practitioners, not a theoretical futurist. His experience represents a concrete data point in the ongoing debate about AI's impact on technical work. While many developers use AI assistants like GitHub Copilot for specific tasks, Karpathy describes a more complete transformation where AI agents handle the implementation while humans focus on higher-level architecture, problem definition, and system orchestration.