Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy co-founded OpenAI, architected Tesla Autopilot, and coined «vibe coding». What keeps drawing the source notes back to him is narrower than that biography: he is the person the field quotes when it needs a name for what just changed.

The dating is precise. In an April 2026 interview he places the break at December 2025, when he stopped correcting the code chunks that newer models produced first-try and started trusting them continuously. His opening line there is "never felt more behind as a programmer". His taxonomy Software 1.0 / 2.0 / 3.0 (explicit code, learned weights, prompting as programming) and his split between «vibe coding» (raise the floor) and agentic engineering (preserve the quality bar) become the vocabulary other authors build on: Addy Osmani, Shubham Saboo and Sokratis Kartakis reject the binary and stretch it into a spectrum in their May 2026 Google whitepaper, where «Context Engineering», also his term, is named the central skill.

His most-cited observations are the ones about failure. Opus 4.7 refactors 100k lines and then advises walking 50 metres to the car wash. Agents are interns with excellent recall and no taste. LLMs are ghosts, statistical simulation circuits, not animals.

The influence runs downstream as artefacts. «andrej-karpathy-skills», a repository of guidelines for «Claude Code» built on his observations about models assuming without verifying and over-abstracting, passed 3,400 stars in days. His closing formula: "You can outsource your thinking but you can't outsource your understanding."