Nathaniel (NLW) Whittemore

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Beyond that, he also just has a bit of a savant reputation.

This is the guy who coined the term vibe coding back in February, and he is just a great listen.

As Signal on Twitter put it, Carpathy speaks like someone who's running a mental compiler in real time, with minimal interpretive latency and almost zero runtime garbage.

He's not verbose, he just threads complexity into compressed lossless statements.

Most smart people can be dense, but they lose clarity.

Carpathy keeps clarity while cranking the bitrate like an LLM tuned with perfect temperature control.

Okay, so we've got one, Carpathy not having incentives to lie to us.

Two, the general quality of his thoughts and the respect for his thoughts.

And that, of course, leads us to the next thing, which is that reversals always feel like a bigger potential narrative violation or shifting force.

And even though, as he points out, he's been talking about this being a decade-long project throughout 2025, to people who weren't really paying attention, this might feel like a shift.

This is the guy who coined vibe coding and now he says it's slop?

That feels bigger than just some other critic, even if that other critic was saying the same things.

The next point of resonance is that there are lots of folks, even who work in tech, who believe in AI but think that the promises are overblown, at least in the short term.