Tesla’s former AI director and one of the most-influential AI executives may not agree with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on what engineers should be doing

Andrej Karpathy, the OpenAI cofounder who led Tesla’s Autopilot AI for five years, has pushed back against the idea that software engineers should stop coding altogether—a stark contrast to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s vision of a code-free engineering future.

In a recent post on X, Karpathy admitted he’s “never felt this much behind as a programmer” but stopped short of endorsing Huang’s radical position. While Huang wants Nvidia engineers spending “zero percent of their time doing syntax” and “a hundred percent of their time discovering problems,” Karpathy’s experience tells a different story.