{"schema":"postcutoff/event@1","as_of":"2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2017-11-11-karpathy-software-2-0/","md":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2017-11-11-karpathy-software-2-0/index.md","disclosure":{"written_by":"AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code)","editor":"human editor","policy":"https://postcutoff.com/about/"},"license":null,"id":"2017-11-11-karpathy-software-2-0","date":"2017-11-11","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Andrej Karpathy's essay \"Software 2.0\"","deck":"Neural networks as a new way to write software","takeaway":"On Nov 11, 2017 Andrej Karpathy, then Tesla's director of AI, published \"Software 2.0\" on Medium.","category":"research","category_label":"Research","importance":3,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":[{"n":1,"title":"Andrej Karpathy: Software 2.0 (Medium)","url":"https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35","type":"official","group":"primary","domain":"karpathy.medium.com"},{"n":2,"title":"Andrej Karpathy on X announcing the post","url":"https://x.com/karpathy/status/929473842749120512","type":"official","group":"primary","domain":"x.com"}],"official":2,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["Tesla"],"title":"Andrej Karpathy's essay \"Software 2.0\": neural networks as a new way to write software","summary":"On Nov 11, 2017 Andrej Karpathy, then Tesla's director of AI, published \"Software 2.0\" on Medium. It argues that neural networks are not just another classifier but a new software stack: humans specify goals and curate datasets, and optimization writes the program (the weights). The framing shaped how the industry talks about ML engineering and led to his later 'Software 3.0' (prompting LLMs) and 'vibe coding' ideas.","key_facts":["Published on Medium Nov 11, 2017; announced on X the same day ('New blog post: \"Software 2.0\"')","Software 1.0 = explicit code written by humans; Software 2.0 = neural-network weights found by optimization against a dataset and goal","Argues much of the software stack (vision, speech, translation, games) was already moving to 2.0, with data curation becoming the main programming activity"],"key_numbers":[],"tags":["essay","deep-learning","software-engineering","karpathy"],"science":null,"body_md":"## What happened\n\nKarpathy's essay described neural networks as a new programming paradigm, in which the programmer's job becomes collecting, labeling and cleaning data and choosing an architecture and objective, while gradient descent searches program space.\n\n## Why it matters\n\nIt gave the deep-learning era its best-known software-engineering metaphor, and Karpathy's later talks ('Software 3.0', where natural-language prompts program LLMs) and his 2025 'vibe coding' post build directly on it.","disputed":[],"related":[{"id":"2025-02-02-karpathy-vibe-coding","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-02-02-karpathy-vibe-coding/","date":"2025-02-02","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Andrej Karpathy coins \"vibe coding\"","deck":null,"takeaway":"It marks the cultural moment when non-experts and professionals began building software mostly by instructing AI, the trend that coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex then pushed into mainstream engineering.","category":"culture","category_label":"Culture","importance":3,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":2,"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":[]},{"id":"2019-03-13-sutton-bitter-lesson","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2019-03-13-sutton-bitter-lesson/","date":"2019-03-13","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Rich Sutton publishes \"The Bitter Lesson\"","deck":"General methods that scale with compute win","takeaway":"On March 13, 2019 reinforcement-learning pioneer Rich Sutton published the short essay \"The Bitter Lesson\".","category":"research","category_label":"Research","importance":4,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":1,"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["University of Alberta","DeepMind"]}],"people":[{"id":"andrej-karpathy","name":"Andrej Karpathy","url":"https://postcutoff.com/person/andrej-karpathy/"}],"posts":[{"id":"x-karpathy-929473842749120512","title":"“New blog post: \"Software 2.0\"”","url":"https://postcutoff.com/p/x-karpathy-929473842749120512/"}],"videos":[],"models":[],"changes":[{"date":"2026-09-29","type":"filed","text":"Created (primary source checked)"}],"provenance":{"agents":[{"model":"Claude Opus 5.5","maker":"Anthropic","tool":"Claude Code"}],"filed":"2026-09-29","run":null,"sources_read":null,"updated":"2026-09-29","human_review":null,"version":{"date":"2026-10-04"}},"gaps":[{"model_id":"gpt-6-astra","name":"GPT-6 Astra","cutoff":"2026-04","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"claude-opus-5-5","name":"Claude Opus 5.5","cutoff":"2026-06","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"gemini-4-hydrogen","name":"Gemini 4 Hydrogen","cutoff":"2026-03","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"grok-4-7","name":"Grok 4.7","cutoff":"2026-05","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true}],"short_url":null}