Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

95% terrible expression of the landscape, 5% neatly dumbed down analogies.

English is a terrible language for deterministic outcomes in complex/complicated systems. Vibe coders won't understand this until they are 2 years into building the thing.

LLMs have their merits and he sometimes aludes to them, although it almost feels accidental.

Also, you don't spend years studying computer science to learn the language/syntax, but rather the concepts and systems, which don't magically disappear with vibe coding.

This whole direction is a cheeky Trojan horse. A dramatic problem, hidden in a flashy solution, to which a fix will be upsold 3 years from now.

I'm excited to come back to this comment in 3 years.

I am not sure I got your point about English. I thought Karpathy was talking about English being the language of prompts, not output. Outputs can be English but if the goal is to compute using the output, then we need structured output (JSON, snippets of code, etc.), not English.

Entertain me in an exercise:

First, instruct a friend/colleague of how to multiply two 2 digit numbers in plain English.

Secondly (ideally with a different friend, to not contaminate tests), explain the same but using only maths formulas.

Where does the prompting process start and where does it end? Is it a one-off? Is the prompt clear enough? Do all the parties involved communicate within same domain objects?

Hopefully my example is not too contrived.