2 KiB
| type | title | author | twitter_id | url | date | domain | secondary_domains | format | status | priority | tags | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| source | Programming fundamentally changed in December 2025 — coding agents basically didn't work before and basically work since | Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) | 33836629 | https://x.com/karpathy/status/2026731645169185220 | 2026-02-25 | ai-alignment |
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tweet | unprocessed | medium |
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Content
It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn't work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.
Agent Notes
Why this matters: 37K likes — Karpathy's most viral tweet in this dataset. This is the "phase transition" observation from the most authoritative voice in AI dev tooling. December 2025 as the inflection point for coding agents.
KB connections: Supports as AI-automated software development becomes certain the bottleneck shifts from building capacity to knowing what to build. Relates to the gap between theoretical AI capability and observed deployment is massive across all occupations — but suggests the gap is closing fast for software specifically.
Extraction hints: Claim candidate: coding agent capability crossed a usability threshold in December 2025, representing a phase transition not gradual improvement. Evidence: Karpathy's direct experience running agents on nanochat.
Context: This tweet preceded the autoresearch project by ~10 days. The 37K likes suggest massive resonance across the developer community. The "asterisks" he mentions are important qualifiers that a good extraction should preserve.