October 2025. Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI founding member, former Tesla AI director: “Overall, the models are not there. It’s slop.” He didn’t want agents going off for 20 minutes dumping 1,000 lines of code. He feared “mountains of slop accumulating across software.”

December 2025. Same Karpathy: “I’ve never felt this behind as a programmer. A 10X boost is available and a failure to claim it feels decidedly like skill issue.”

Two months. That’s how fast he flipped.

Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, replied he feels the same “most weeks.” His stats: 259 PRs, 497 commits, 40k lines added in 30 days. Every line written by Claude. To build Claude Code.

I haven’t coded in months. I ship from Slack while waiting for my kids at school. Even my code reviews are done by Claude. I’m probably more productive than ever.

The real issue

The “skill issue” isn’t about knowing how to code. It’s about letting go.

Seniors have mass to lose. Years of muscle memory, reflexes, craft pride. Karpathy himself took two months to update his mental model.

Juniors have nothing to unlearn. They arrive without the baggage that “code means typing characters.”

The real divide isn’t junior vs senior. It’s those who let go vs those who cling to the old craft.

Which side are you on?