Andrej Karpathy said in a podcast interview that he had not typed a line of code since December 2025. The OpenAI co-founder and former director of AI at Tesla said that since December 2025, he has written almost none of his own code himself, delegating coding tasks to AI coding agents.

Prior to December 2025, Karpathy wrote roughly 80% of his own code himself. "Coding agents basically didn't work before December and basically work since," he said. He runs multiple coding agents in parallel on a tiled monitor, assigning features to each and reviewing their outputs as they return.

Under agentic engineering, the developer acts as a project manager routing tasks across a team of machines. "Programming is becoming unrecognizable," Karpathy said. According to Karpathy, in the new AI-driven workflow, developers who can decompose tasks precisely, formulate clear prompts, and review outputs efficiently outperform those who cannot, regardless of raw coding ability.

"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," Karpathy said.

In early 2025, Karpathy introduced the term "vibe coding" to describe casually prompting AI to generate code with minimal oversight, useful for quick projects but not for production systems. He invoked the Jevons paradox to argue that automation can increase demand when a resource becomes cheaper. He argued that as software production costs approach zero, the number of applications people want to build expands substantially.

The shift toward AI-assisted coding comes as overall programmer employment in the United States fell 27.5% between 2023 and 2025. A Stanford Digital Economy Study published in August 2025 analyzed payroll data from ADP covering millions of workers. Between late 2022 and August 2025, employment for software developers aged 22 to 25 declined by nearly 20%, while employment for software developers over 30 grew by between 6% and 12%.

Job postings for entry-level and junior developer roles dropped by roughly 40% compared to levels before 2022. Tasks that constitute a junior developer's first two years on the job, such as basic functions, boilerplate code, and simple application scaffolding, are now among the first to be automated away by AI. Between 2022 and 2025, the number of computer science graduates continued to rise.

"Nobody has patience or time for hand-holding in this new environment, where a lot of the work can be done by AI autonomously," said Heather Doshay, head of people at SignalFire.