Chasing the Karpathy Peak (and Falling Off Slop Cliff)

"How I became a slopaholic, who’s most at risk, and how to avoid it (or recover)".

This is not just insightful and useful, it's also simply a great piece of writing: well written & structured, humourous, and reinforced by a whole series of brilliant xckd and xkcd-style cartoons. Let's start with some key definitions:

• " Ballmer Peak... a very specific level of drunkenness that supposedly gives you superhuman programming ability...
• Karpathy Peak (n.): the point where you’re getting as much useful work out of AI as the inventor of vibe coding himself.
• Slop Cliff (n.): the point where your actual productivity with AI drops off while your perceived productivity keeps climbing.

While written from the perspective of a developer (he's done research fellowships at Anthropic & Google DeepMind), he observes that "writing is where I notice it most... You spend an hour having it rewrite a passage a million times... do it yourself, and realize you could have just done it in 10 minutes... AI is useful for helping me realize how I don’t want to write, which makes ... writing easier".

God I recognise this: I write a lot, and am integrating Claude Code into my content pipeline, but recently drew a line that I don't let my personal agent cross for this and other reasons. All those reasons are explained here, with citations: not only is the productivity gain a mirage, it can actually harm you:

"if you don’t notice you’ve fallen off Slop Cliff, you can keep going down. The further you get from doing the work yourself, the harder it is to climb back out: you understand less of what the AI is doing, so you lean on it more, so you understand even less. Eventually you end up in the Pit of Psychosis".

As he points out, at this point AI usage starts looking like drug usage: it can make you high, it's hard to stop, and you can look functional to everyone else "Unless someone directly engages with the details of your work". And it can end very, very badly: "AI addiction has already been linked to deaths, and to people being involuntarily committed, jailed or fired. "

It may even be worse: "AI usage doesn’t wear off naturally: With intoxication, there can be a next morning ... AI usage has no built-in reset." Instead, you delegate to a tool which is programmed to reassure you that all is well.

He ends with risk factors and techniques for sobering up.