Karpathy on Claude Code
Yes I have been Claude Code-ing a bunch, so instead of telling you what I think, here's my commentary on what someone a lot smarter than me thinks.
Fun. I didn't anticipate that with agents programming feels *more* fun because a lot of the fill in the blanks drudgery is removed and what remains is the creative part.
But:
Atrophy. I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually. Generation (writing code) and discrimination (reading code) are different capabilities in the brain.
Using Claude Code to write code is like learning a language by reading alone. Being able to read signs in a foreign language doesn't mean that you're fluent... but a lot of the time it's sufficient.
So much of what makes me a good coder is only doable when I’m down in the code itself, manually moving things around to build a legible API.
And worse:
Slopacolypse. I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media. We're also going to see a lot more AI hype productivity theater (is that even possible?), on the side of actual, real improvements.
You thought that JavaScript fatigue was bad — I can feel a serious backlash building in 2027.
A few random notes from claude coding quite a bit last few weeks, Andrej Karpathy