“I Program in English Now”: The AI ‘Psychosis’ That's Ending Coding as We Know It
Former OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy programs exclusively in English via AI agents—a shift that's leaving millions of developers facing an uncertain future.
Former OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy hasn’t written a line of code since December 2025. He’s not alone. A tidal wave of “agentic coding” has silently swept through Silicon Valley’s most advanced labs, from OpenAI to Anthropic to xAI, rendering traditional software engineering obsolete almost overnight. The revolution isn’t coming—it’s already here, and it’s rewriting the very definition of what it means to be a programmer. But as the industry celebrates its productivity boom, a deeper question emerges: What happens to the millions of mid-level workers who were told coding was their “ticket to the middle class”?
The Smoking Gun
Karpathy’s bombshell admission dropped March 21 on the No Priors podcast: “I don’t think I’ve typed like a line of code probably since December.” The OpenAI cofounder described a “state of psychosis”—an obsessive, sleepless push to discover what’s possible when you delegate everything to AI agents. In the span of just three months, his workflow inverted from 80% manual coding to 100% agent-driven. “It’s so dramatic that a normal person doesn’t even realize it happened,” he said. But Karpathy isn’t an outlier; he’s the canary in the coal mine.
Business Insider obtained a January 26 X post where Karpathy first documented the shift: “I really am mostly programming in English now, a bit sheepishly telling the LLM what code to write.” Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Boris Cherny confirmed his team writes “pretty much 100% of our code” with Claude Code—and for Cherny personally, it’s been 100% for two months with zero manual edits. At Uber, the CTO revealed 1,800 agent-authored commits per week; at Google, a senior director said AI agents write the “substantial majority” of code. The transformation isn’t theoretical—it’s quantified and accelerating.
Swarm Intelligence
The most mind-bending development? Engineers now run fleets of 10-20 agents in parallel, like floor managers rotating between assembly lines. Karpathy himself delegates “macro-actions”—entire features, research projects, architectural plans—to separate agents that each take ~20 minutes. This “command center” model flips everything: the bottleneck isn’t compute power anymore, it’s human token throughput. “I feel nervous when I have subscription left over,” Karpathy admitted. “That means I haven’t maximized my token throughput.” The race isn’t about who has the best GPU cluster; it’s about who can best orchestrate their agent swarm.
The Democratic Deficit
This is where the revolution darkens. OpenAI is doubling its workforce to 8,000—but these aren’t coders. They’re “technical ambassadors,” managers of agent swarms, prompt engineers, and verification specialists. The infrastructure that powers our digital world will soon be controlled by a tiny elite of Swarm Directors, while the 1.8 million software developers in the U.S. alone (Bureau of Labor Statistics) face obsolescence. This isn’t just another industrial transition; it’s a concentration of technical control unprecedented in human history. The very people who built the internet’s foundations are being priced out by their own creation. When a global payment system, a hospital database, or a power grid’s control software is written and maintained by 8,000 highly-paid specialists in California and New York, what happens to the Midwest developer in Omaha or the coder in Bangalore? The “democratic deficit” in our technical infrastructure is about to become a crisis.
Asymmetry and Existential Irony
There’s a cruel twist: the same systems automating coding are automating the automation. Karpathy unveiled the “auto research” framework—an autonomous loop where agents propose, test, and iterate on code improvements overnight. In one experiment, an agent found 20 hyperparameter tweaks humans missed. The verification asymmetry makes this terrifyingly scalable: generating candidate commits requires massive compute, but verifying if they work is cheap. This opens the door to untrusted global swarms potentially “running circles around Frontier Labs.” The irony? OpenAI’s researchers are actively building systems that will render their own jobs obsolete—and they know it. “Highly paid researchers are building the exact automated systems that will render their daily workflows obsolete,” noted a LinkedIn analysis. “That’s the existential irony.”
What Comes Next
The human cost is already visible. Karpathy confesses his manual coding skills are “slowly starting to atrophy.” The “hurt the ego” realization that you’re no longer needed to write code is “too powerful to ignore.” The industry is scrambling—but not to save jobs. Instead, they’re redefining success: fluency in English (or whatever your native language is) is now the primary skill. Jevons paradox dictates software demand will explode now that it’s cheaper to produce. And Karpathy’s three-phase prediction: first digital overhang (rewriting all the bits), then sensors/actuators (the physical interface), finally atoms (robotics). We’re in phase one, moving at “speed of light.”
The Brewster Take
The “psychosis” Karpathy describes isn’t mental illness—it’s the psychological shock of witnessing your life’s work become automated in real time. The takeaway is twofold. First: coding as a skill is dead, not by government decree or corporate layoffs, but by technological obsolescence. The engineers who survive won’t be those who write the best Python; they’ll be those who craft the best English prompts, who design the most elegant verification metrics, who can spot the 20 improvements a swarm of agents missed overnight. Second: we’re creating a technical aristocracy. When the infrastructure that runs society is built and maintained by a few thousand “Swarm Directors” in coastal tech hubs, while millions of former coders watch from the sidelines, we haven’t just automated a job—we’ve automated our way into a new Gilded Age. As Karpathy chillingly noted, “The verb changed. You’re not coding; you’re expressing intent to agents.” The human’s new job is to be the “director of the token generating swarm.” The question is: who gets to be the director, and who gets left behind?