Karpathy's Software 3.0 Playbook

Based on Andrej Karpathy’s interview with Sequoia at AI Ascent Andrej Karpathy is one of the few people who has both built modern AI and explained it for the rest of us. He co-founded OpenAI, ran computer vision at Tesla (where he got Autopilot working), and his courses on neural networks are some of the most-watched lectures on the internet. He also has a habit of naming the era we’re already in. “Vibe coding” was his. “Software 3.0” looks like the next one. So when Karpathy says he has “never felt more behind as a programmer,” it is worth slowing down. That isn’t false modesty from a guy with his résumé. Something shifted under the field and most people haven’t recalibrated. The Sequoia interview below is his attempt to describe what shifted. The lessons here are pulled from it, ordered roughly by how much they should change what you do tomorrow. 1. Inflection point December 2024 Until late last year, agentic coding tools were “kind of helpful.” Good in stretches, often wrong in…