'Never Felt This Behind': Ex-Tesla Exec's Big Warning To Software Engineers Amid AI Surge

Tesla's former director of artificial intelligence (AI) Andrej Karpathy stated that software programmers need to "roll up their sleeves" and "not fall behind" when it comes to coding, due to the advancements made by AI.

Karpathy had coined the term "vibe coding" to describe making apps and websites with the help of AI without knowing how to code, and announced his own AI education firm Eureka Labs.

The AI researcher made a post on X to share his perspective on how AI has changed the requirements a software engineer needs to have to maintain an edge in their field.

"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," Karpathy said.

He added that he feels that he could be 10 times more effective if he knew how to effectively utilise the AI tools that are at a programmer's disposal and stated that his failure to do so "feels decidedly like skill issue."

Karpathy pointed towards a new programmable layer of abstraction to master for programmers which involve AI agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows and IDE integrations.

He also stated that there is "a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities" which are now to be used side-by-side with "good old fashioned engineering."

"Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession," Karpathy said, regarding AI.

"Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind," he added in his post.