Andrej Karpathy, the former Tesla autopilot head and an ex-OpenAI researcher, has voiced his preference for the rapidly evolving programming landscape assisted by AI, over traditional "unassisted" coding.
What Happened: On Friday, Karpathy said on X, "Programming is changing so fast... I'm trying VS Code Cursor + Sonnet 3.5 instead of GitHub Copilot again and I think it's now a net win."
He elaborated that his programming work now primarily involves writing English, reviewing and editing generated diffs, and doing a bit of "half-coding."
This process includes writing the initial part of the code, commenting it for the large language model (LLM) to understand the plan, and then cycling through iterations.
While Karpathy admitted that he is still acclimatizing to all the features of this new programming approach, he stated, "I basically can't imagine going back to 'unassisted' coding at this point, which was the only possibility just ~3 years ago."
Programming is changing so fast... I'm trying VS Code Cursor + Sonnet 3.5 instead of GitHub Copilot again and I think it's now a net win. Just empirically, over the last few days most of my "programming" is now writing English (prompting and then reviewing and editing the...
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) August 24, 2024
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Why It Matters: Karpathy's comments reflect a broader trend in the tech industry, where AI is increasingly being used to automate coding tasks.
Earlier this month, Amazon Web Services CEO, Matt Garman, predicted that AI could soon dominate coding, stating, "It's possible that most developers are not coding" in the near future.
This prediction seems to be coming true. According to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, their AI assistant, Amazon Q, has significantly cut down software upgrade times, saving thousands of work hours. The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 dropped from 50 developer days to just a few hours, thanks to Amazon Q, Jassy revealed.
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