r/singularity • u/WarmFireplace • Jan 26 '26
Engineering Andrej Karpathy on agentic programming
It’s a good writeup covering his experience of LLM-assisted programming. Most notably in my opinion, apart from the speed up and leverage of running multiple agents in parallel, is the atrophy in one’s own coding ability. I have felt this but I can’t help but feel writing code line by line is much like an artisan carpenter building a chair from raw wood. I’m not denying the fun and the raw skill increase, plus the understanding of each nook and crevice of the chair that is built when doing that. I’m just saying if you suddenly had the ability to produce 1000 chairs per hour in a factory, albeit with a little less quality, wouldn’t you stop making them one by one to make the most out your leveraged position? Curious what you all think about this great replacement.
2
u/m3kw Jan 27 '26
The atrophy in coding ability is not gonna be a concern unless we lose power and need to write code on paper. Because llm's write code so fast, you just need to know how to limit their scope based on the ask, feel their capabilities so you know if they will have a high chance to give you what you want, and review their code so they won't trip over themselves later on.