Field Notes on a Craft in Transformation

Andrej Karpathy — founding member of OpenAI, former head of AI at Tesla — posted what he called "random notes" on coding with Claude. They're not random. They're one of the most grounded practitioner assessments of what's happening to software engineering. Today: the gains, the failure modes, the transformations, and the shadows.In this episode:The 80/20 flip: from manual coding to agent coding in one monthTenacity as revelation: "stamina is a core bottleneck to work"The fun paradox: why coding feels more enjoyable, not lessThe failure catalogue: sycophancy, bloat, and "slightly sloppy junior dev" as mental modelAtrophy: generation vs discrimination, and what it means for learningSlopacolypse: bracing for 2026The open questions: 10X engineers, generalists vs specialists, StarCraft or Factorio or music?Links:Andrej Karpathy's post on XReferenced: EP001 The Day After Davos, EP003 The Dumbest Smart Technique in AI📰 Newsletter: aboutclaudeai.substack.com🦋 X: @_about_claude Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.