Agency over intelligence, and 2025

Andrej Karpathy@karpathy

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become

5:36 PM · Dec 26, 2025 · 16.7M Views

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2.61K Replies · 7.52K Reposts · 56K Likes

Andrej tweets a lot of useful insights, but this one hits differently. Intelligence and experience will give you an upper hand, but only if you’re willing to invalidate every aspect of how you’ve worked over your career (see Boris, inventor of Claude Code, in the replies). Even now I see some engineers (usually senior) taking jabs at the AI integrations in our workflows at Google. Or they push the narrative from upper management, but you can tell they haven’t extensively tried the very things they’re pushing. I have no reservations about using agents to write my CLs. In fact, one key benefit as Gemini reaches parity with other frontier models is that I have unlimited quota.

I know the job market for new engineers is tough, but sooner or later even big institutions will realize that having this “AI-native” fresh blood is hugely beneficial for adopting new tools.

2026 is shaping up to be an incredibly exciting(?) year in so many ways.

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Only a few days left.

Below are some things I enjoyed listening to and reading this year:

• Shin Ji Hoon: memories, soon to be a chapter of an anthology

• Dwarkesh Podcast

• Dario Amodei: Urgency of Interpretability

• Ivan Zhao: Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds

• Works in Progress magazine

Some tools I replaced:

• Raycast instead of Spotlight

• Helium, the browser (RIP Arc)

• Orbstack instead of Docker

• Gemini instead of ChatGPT for general queries (have you tried the live mode?)

• Claude models instead of GPT-* models for coding

• Ghostty instead of iTerm2