Karpathy on the evolving optimal setup

quote
ai
agents
Author

Lawrence Wu

Published

March 22, 2026

With improving capability, every point in time has an optimal setup that keeps changing and evolving and the community average tracks the point. None -> Tab -> Agent -> Parallel agents -> Agent Teams (?) -> ???

If you’re too conservative, you’re leaving leverage on the table. If you’re too aggressive, you’re net creating more chaos than doing useful work.

The art of the process is spending 80% of the time getting work done in the setup you’re comfortable with and that actually works, and 20% exploration of what might be the next step up even if it doesn’t work yet.

@karpathy