Revolution in Programming with AI Agents

On February 26, 2026, Andrej Karpathy, a former AI developer at Tesla and OpenAI, stated that AI agents have undergone fundamental changes in the past two months.

In a post on X, he noted that before December of last year, AI agents were almost incapable of handling practical development tasks. However, with improvements in model quality and execution capabilities, these agents have become much more reliable.

Karpathy provided an example where he described his requirements in English, and an AI agent completed the development of a video analysis dashboard within 30 minutes, autonomously solving problems and delivering results. He remarked that such tasks would have required a developer an entire weekend just three months prior.

He believes that programming today has been completely transformed; traditional methods are being radically changed. Developers no longer need to write code line by line but can initiate AI agents and assign tasks using natural language while supervising multiple agents simultaneously. However, human oversight and high-level guidance remain essential.

Notably, until October 2025, Karpathy thought that AI agents were being overhyped, but his perspective changed after the release of Opus 4.5 and Codex 5.2.

Karpathy introduced the concept of “vibe coding,” which emphasizes using natural language prompts to allow AI to generate code directly. He encourages developers to relinquish their need for control and work in harmony with the capabilities of these tools. This term was later recognized as the word of the year by Collins Dictionary in 2025.