Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AI

**Sarah Guo** (0:00)
Code's not even the right verb anymore, right? But I have to express my will to my agents for 16 hours a day. Manifest.

**Andrej Karpathy** (0:07)
How can I have not just a single session of plot code or codex or some of these agent harnesses? How can I have more of them? How can I do that appropriately? The agent part is now taken for granted. Now the claw-like entities are taken for granted, and now you can have multiple of them, and now you can have instructions to them, and now you can have optimization over the instructions. But I mean, this is why it gets to the psychosis, is that this is like infinite, and everything is skill issue.

**Sarah Guo** (0:34)
Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Andrej Karpathy, and we have a wide-ranging conversation for you about code agents, the future of engineering and AI research, how more people can contribute to research, what's happening in robotics, his prediction for how agents can reach out into the real world, and education in this next age. Welcome, Andrej. Andrej, thanks for doing this.

**Andrej Karpathy** (0:57)
Yeah, thank you for having me.

**Sarah Guo** (0:59)
So it's been a very exciting couple of months in AI.

**Andrej Karpathy** (1:02)
Yeah, you could say that.

**Sarah Guo** (1:03)
I remember walking into the office at some point and you were like really locked in. I was asking what you were up to and you're like, I just I have to code for 16 hours a day. Or code is not even the right verb anymore. Right. But I have to express my will to my agents for 16 hours a day. Manifest. Because like there's been a jump in capability. What's happening? Tell me about your experience.

**Andrej Karpathy** (1:28)
Yeah, I kind of feel like I was in this perpetual. I still am often in this state of AI psychosis just like all the time. Because there was a huge unlock in what you can achieve as a person, as an individual, right? Because you were bottlenecked by, you know, your typing speed and so on. But now with these agents, it really, I would say in December is when it really just something flipped where I kind of went from 80-20 of like, you know, to like 20-80 of writing code by myself versus just delegating to agents. And I don't even think it's 20-80 by now. I think it's a lot more than that. I don't think I've typed like a line of code probably since December, basically. Which is like an extremely large change. I was talking to it, like for example, I was talking about it to, for example, my parents and so on. And I don't think like a normal person actually realizes that this happened or how dramatic it was. Like literally, like if you just find a random software engineer or something like that at their desk and what they're doing, like their default workflow of, you know, building software is completely different as of basically December.
So I'm just like in this state of psychosis of trying to figure out like what's possible, trying to push it to the limit. How can I have not just a single session of, you know, Cloud Code or Codex or some of these agent harnesses? How can I have more of them? How can I do that appropriately? And then how can I use these claws? What are these claws? And so there's like a lot of new things. I want to be at the forefront of it, you know, and I'm very antsy that I'm not at the forefront of it. And I see lots of people on Twitter doing all kinds of things, and they all sound like really good ideas. And I need to be at the forefront or I feel extremely nervous. And so I guess I'm just in the psychosis of like, what's possible, like, because it's unexplored fundamentally.

**Sarah Guo** (3:00)
Well, if you're nervous, the rest of us are nervous.
We have a team that we work with at Conviction that their setup is everybody is like, you know, none of the engineers write code by hand, and they're all microphoned and they just like whisper to their agents all the time. It's the strangest work setting ever. And I thought they were crazy. And now I fully accept, I was like, oh, this was the way. Like, you're just ahead of it. What, how do you think about your own capacity now to like explore or to do projects? What is it limited by?

**Andrej Karpathy** (3:32)
Yeah, what is it limited by? Just I think everything, like so many things, even if they don't work, I think to a large extent you feel like it's a skill issue. It's not that the capability is not there. It's that you just haven't found a way to string it together of what's available. Like I just don't, I didn't give good enough instructions in the agents from the file or whatever it may be. I don't have a nice enough memory tool that I put in there or something like that. So it all kind of feels like a skill issue when it doesn't work to some extent. You want to see how you can parallelize them, etc. And you want to be Peter Steinberg, basically. So Peter is famous. He has a funny photo where he's in front of a monitor with lots of, like he uses Codex. So lots of Codex agents styling the monitor. And they all take about 20 minutes if you prompt them correctly and use the high effort. And so they all take about 20 minutes. They have multiple, you know, 10 repos checked out.