'Never felt this behind': OpenAI co-founder admits AI is evolving so fast it’s 'refactoring' how developers work

OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has admitted that the fast pace of artificial intelligence development has left even seasoned programmers like him scrambling to keep up.

“I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer,” Karpathy wrote in a candid post on X (formally twitter), likening today’s AI tools to alien technology with “no manual.” He warned that engineers slow to adapt risk being left behind as software development undergoes a radical shift.

Karpathy believes AI can make developers “10X more powerful”—but only if they learn to harness a new “programmable layer of abstraction.” Today’s development environment, he explained, involves managing intelligent agents, subagents, prompts, memory, permissions, and tools, among other emerging components.

 

 

 

 

 

Coding is no longer just about writing lines of code, he said. It's now about orchestrating AI systems that work alongside humans—blending programming with language skills, prompt engineering, and system-level thinking.

Developers, Karpathy noted, must form “an all-encompassing mental model” of large language models (LLMs), which are fundamentally unpredictable, fallible, and constantly evolving.

Earlier this month, he described using tools like GPT or Claude as “like managing a team of interns with telepathy”—powerful but chaotic. In another post, he quipped that AI coding assistants are like magic, “except that the magic sometimes sets your desk on fire.”

Despite the volatility, Karpathy urged developers to embrace the shift. He said prompt communication, context management, and system design are as essential today as coding was a decade ago.

His reflections underscore the AI revolution underway—and the growing challenge of staying relevant, even for those who helped build it.