Karpathy is the greatest popularizer of psychosis. You can genuinely lose your mind coding with Claude Code if you do it the way Karpathy advises. And in a recent interview he admitted he can see himself becoming psychologically unhinged while “vibe coding” - and he isn’t exaggerating. So how do you stay sane while working with coding agents? There’s a study with answers to that question.
Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” and it became a fashionable way to work like a monkey, think like a monkey, and simulate your own psychosis like… a human. Karpathy isn’t merely spreading silly ideas - he is literally poisoning engineers with utterly insane ways to burn their priceless time in pursuit of yet another state of psychosis.
In this post I invite you to read a scientific paper that describes the key differences between the “vibe coding” Karpathy proposed and an alternative, far more useful methodology for spending your time productively while still involving coding agents like Claude or Codex in your own creative process.
The paper is called “Vibe coding: programming through conversation with artificial intelligence” and was written jointly by Cambridge scientists and Microsoft researchers. The main point of the paper is to teach us to separate useful work alongside coding agents from Karpathy’s so-called “vibe coding,” which is associated far more strongly with active psychosis than with useful work.
Once you’ve absorbed the substance of the paper, you’ll finally be able to retrain yourself to turn programming sessions with agents from vibe-coding psychosis into useful, meaningful, and still enjoyable work. Let your AI help you with translation, condensing the read, and explaining the tricky parts.