Tesla’s former AI chief Andrej Karpathy warns software engineers: 'I’ve never felt…'

Andrej Karpathy, one of the most influential figures in modern artificial intelligence, has delivered a blunt assessment of where software engineering is heading. In what reads like an open letter to developers worldwide, the former Tesla AI director admitted that he has “never felt this much behind as a programmer,” arguing that the profession itself is being fundamentally rewritten by AI.

Karpathy’s comments carry unusual weight. He previously led Tesla’s Autopilot and AI efforts for five years and is also a cofounder of OpenAI. Yet despite this background, he says the pace of change over the past year has left even seasoned engineers struggling to keep up. According to Karpathy, the role of the programmer is shrinking in a traditional sense, with human-written code becoming increasingly sparse between large blocks generated, modified or orchestrated by AI systems.

At the heart of his warning is the emergence of what he describes as a new “programmable layer of abstraction.” Modern developers, he argues, are no longer just writing functions and classes. They are expected to manage agents, sub-agents, prompts, long and short-term context, memory modes, tool protocols and deep integrations inside modern development environments. This shift demands a new mental model for working with systems that are probabilistic, error-prone and constantly changing, rather than deterministic and predictable.

Karpathy also acknowledged a sense of frustration with himself. He believes he could be significantly more productive if he fully mastered the tools now available, but failing to do so increasingly feels like a personal skills gap rather than a tooling problem. That sentiment has resonated with many engineers who feel the ground shifting beneath them faster than they can adapt.