Excerpt from Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Andrej Karpathy that I think is valuable for LessWrong-ers to read. I think he's basically correct. Emphasis in bold is mine.

Andrej Karpathy 00:29:53

I guess I built the repository over a period of a bit more than a month. I would say there are three major classes of how people interact with code right now. Some people completely reject all of LLMs and they are just writing by scratch. This is probably not the right thing to do anymore.

The intermediate part, which is where I am, is you still write a lot of things from scratch, but you use the autocomplete that's available now from these models. So when you start writing out a little piece of it, it will autocomplete for you and you can just tap through. Most of the time it's correct, sometimes it's not, and you edit it. But you’re still very much the architect of what you’re writing. Then there's the vibe coding: “Hi, please implement this or that,” enter, and then let the model do it. That's the agents.

I do feel like the agents work in very specific settings, and I would use them [...]

---

First published:

November 10th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qBsj6HswdmP6ahaGB/andrej-karpathy-on-llm-cognitive-deficits

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.