Andrej Karpathy (co-founder of OpenAI, former head of AI at Tesla, and now founder of Eureka Labs) talks with Sequoia partner Stephanie Zhan at AI Ascent 2026 about what’s changed in the year since he coined “vibe coding.” He explains why he’s never felt more behind as a programmer, why agentic engineering is the more serious discipline taking shape on top of vibe coding, and why we should think of LLMs not as animals but as ghosts: jagged, statistical, summoned entities that require a new kind of taste and judgment to direct. He also touches on Software 3.0, the limits of verifiability, and why you can outsource your thinking but never your understanding.

00: 00 Introduction
00: 44 Feeling Behind as a Coder
02: 28 Software 3.0 Explained
03: 44 Agents as the Installer
04: 49 Menu Gen vs Raw Prompts
07: 37 What’s Obvious by 2026
09: 41 Verifiability and Jagged Skills
13: 39 Founder Advice and Automation
15: 46 From Vibe Coding to Agent Engineering
25: 17 Agents Everywhere and Learning