AI psychosis, agentic engineering, and what changes when the tools rewrite the programmer.

Originally published on Lei Hua's Substack .

Anchors:

Epigraph

"Code is not even the right verb anymore. I have to express my will to my agents for 16 hours a day. "

— Andrej Karpathy, No Priors · 2026-03-20

I. The Inversion You Couldn't See in December

December 2025. The echo of the Dwarkesh interview hadn't faded yet — "slop," "AGI is still a decade away," "summoning ghosts" were still circulating on Twitter. Karpathy himself had quietly moved into the next room.

In that room, something was happening. He would later tell Sarah Guo:

" I don't think I've typed a line of code probably since December. A normal person doesn't realize that this happened or how dramatic it was.…