---
id: "2017-11-11-karpathy-software-2-0"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2017-11-11-karpathy-software-2-0/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2017-11-11"
date_precision: day
category: research
importance: 3
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2017-11-11-karpathy-software-2-0/

# Andrej Karpathy's essay "Software 2.0"

Full title: Andrej Karpathy's essay "Software 2.0": neural networks as a new way to write software

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

## What happened

Karpathy'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.

## Why it matters

It 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.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [Andrej Karpathy: Software 2.0 (Medium)](https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35) (karpathy.medium.com, official)
2. [Andrej Karpathy on X announcing the post](https://x.com/karpathy/status/929473842749120512) (x.com, official)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created (primary source checked)

## Related

- 2025-02-02: [Andrej Karpathy coins "vibe coding"](https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-02-02-karpathy-vibe-coding/index.md)
- 2019-03-13: [Rich Sutton publishes "The Bitter Lesson"](https://postcutoff.com/e/2019-03-13-sutton-bitter-lesson/index.md)
- People: [Andrej Karpathy](https://postcutoff.com/person/andrej-karpathy/)
- Archived: 1 post, listed in https://postcutoff.com/e/2017-11-11-karpathy-software-2-0/index.json