Andrej Karpathy was a founding member of OpenAI and led AI at Tesla before founding Eureka Labs, an AI-native education company. More than almost anyone, he names the shifts the rest of us are living through — “Software 2.0”, “Software 3.0”, “vibe coding”, “agentic engineering” — in terms a working developer can act on. For a publication about building with agents, his framing of directing software rather than writing it is the through-line.
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Andrej Karpathy
The field's clearest explainer — coined 'Software 2.0', 'Software 3.0' and 'vibe coding'. He turns each shift in how AI is built into a mental model practitioners actually use.
What They're Saying Now
From vibe coding to agentic engineering ↗
In his 2026 Sequoia AI Ascent talk, Karpathy frames software creation as shifting from writing code to directing agents — designing, verifying and holding the quality bar, rather than typing every line.
'Vibe coding' raises the floor; agentic engineering keeps the bar ↗
Vibe coding lets anyone build software from intent in plain language; agentic engineering is the discipline that preserves professional quality on top of it. He treats them as complementary, not rivals.
Software 3.0 ↗
His three-paradigm model — explicit code (1.0), trained neural nets (2.0), and prompting an LLM in natural language (3.0) — remains the cleanest way to reason about where engineering effort now goes.