December [2025] Was the Moment

canonical

Origin: @karpathy (Andrej Karpathy), Jan 2026

The consensus narrative that December 2025 was the specific inflection point where coding agents went from 'basically didn't work' to working well enough to change practice. Karpathy's claim: not gradual — specifically December.

Usage

Use as a shared temporal reference for the agentic era's beginning. 'Pre-December' and 'post-December' as periods, like 'before/after COVID.' Citing 'specifically December' signals you're plugged into the consensus narrative.

Mutations & variants

'Post-December' as a period marker 'Coding agents didn't work before December' — the exact falsifiable claim

Cross-platform escapes

Latent Space podcast: dedicated coverage
Year-in-review posts across the ecosystem
'Agentic era arrived' discourse anchor

References

Karpathy tweet: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2026731645169185220
14M+ views, 2.4K+ comments

Shelf life: Canonical — will be cited as a historical marker for years

'December was the moment' is now widely accepted as the consensus. You can reference it without attribution. The specificity is what made it memorable — 'specifically this last December' vs. 'AI has been improving.'

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