Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)
AI Summary
The Software 3.0 talk: hand-written code (1.0), learned weights (2.0), natural-language prompts (3.0) — and the prediction of a coming 'decade of agents.'
Original excerpt
Karpathy's YC keynote supplies the macro frame the rest of this vault sits inside. Software 1.0 is code humans write; 2.0 is neural network weights learned from data; 3.0 is behavior specified in natural language and executed by LLMs. Each layer doesn't replace the last — it colonizes the parts where it's cheaper.
Two ideas from the talk became standard vocabulary: LLMs as a new kind of operating system (with context windows as RAM), and the "decade of agents" — his caution that the transition would be a decade-long grind of engineering, not a single breakthrough year.
Watch this before his 2026 talk (item one of this vault): Software 3.0 is the map, and agentic engineering is what building…
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The Software 3.0 talk: hand-written code (1.0), learned weights (2.0), natural-language prompts (3.0) — and the prediction of a coming 'decade of agents.'
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"Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)" was written by Andrej Karpathy. It is curated in the Agentic Engineering vault on Burn 451, which covers engineering with ai coding agents.
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Content attributed to the original author (Andrej Karpathy). Burn 451 curates publicly available writing as a reading index. For removal requests, contact @hawking520.