{"id":383172,"date":"2025-12-31T19:12:11","date_gmt":"2025-12-31T19:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/383172\/"},"modified":"2025-12-31T19:12:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T19:12:11","slug":"he-coined-vibe-coding-now-he-feels-behind-as-a-programmer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/383172\/","title":{"rendered":"He Coined ‘Vibe Coding.’ Now, He Feels Behind As a Programmer."},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrej Karpathy has long been ahead.<\/p>\n

He was ahead of the AI boom, having worked as a founding member of OpenAI<\/a> in 2015, long before competitors like Anthropic and xAI emerged. He also got into self-driving vehicles early, steering Tesla’s autopilot effort<\/a> as its head of AI.<\/p>\n

Now, he says, “I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer.”<\/p>\n

In an X post<\/a> on Friday, Karpathy wrote that the industry was being “dramatically refactored,” as individual programmers contribute fewer and fewer lines of code.<\/p>\n

“I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year,” he wrote. “A failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue.”<\/p>\n

I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2014 Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) December 26, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n

AI has radically transformed the software engineering industry, introducing code editors like Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex, along with a slew of agentic software development tools. Business Insider’s Amanda Hoover called 2025 “the year coding changed forever<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

Karpathy was a key player in the change. In February, he coined the term “vibe coding.” To vibe code<\/a>, one prompts AI to generate lines of code. (It gets its name because developers “fully give in to the vibes,” Karpathy wrote in his original post<\/a>.) The Collins Dictionary named it the word of the year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Still, Karpathy wrote that it’s like a “powerful alien tool” was handed out without a manual.<\/p>\n

“Everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession,” he wrote.<\/p>\n

In the comments, another one of the biggest names in vibe-coding agreed. Boris Cherny created Claude Code<\/a> for Anthropic, now one of the most popular AI tools<\/a> among developers.<\/p>\n

Cherny wrote<\/a> that he felt that way “most weeks,” and that he sometimes finds himself approaching a problem manually, not yet realizing AI can do it faster.<\/p>\n

New graduates and early career coders may fare best in this new environment, Cherny wrote, because they don’t assume what AI can and cannot do.<\/p>\n

“It takes significant mental work to re-adjust to what the model can do every month or two, as models continue to become better and better at coding and engineering,” he wrote.<\/p>\n

Responding to Cherny, Karpathy wrote that he had similar experiences. He analogized the new tools to a weapon, one that sometimes “shoots pellets” or “misfires” \u2014\u00a0highlighting the work-in-progress nature of AI.<\/p>\n

Other times, though, the tools work wonders.<\/p>\n

“Once in a while when you hold it just right a powerful beam of laser erupts and melts your problem,” he wrote.<\/p>\n

Tell us how you have been impacted by vibe-coding below: <\/p>\n