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 month
• Tenacity as revelation: "stamina is a core bottleneck to work"
• The fun paradox: why coding feels more enjoyable, not less
• The failure catalogue: sycophancy, bloat, and "slightly sloppy junior dev" as mental model
• Atrophy: generation vs discrimination, and what it means for learning
• Slopacolypse: bracing for 2026
• The open questions: 10X engineers, generalists vs specialists, StarCraft or Factorio or music?

Links:

• Andrej Karpathy's post on X
• Referenced: EP001 The Day After Davos, EP003 The Dumbest Smart Technique in AI

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