Andrej Karpathy called it “AI psychosis.” If you’ve felt it too, this piece explains the psychology behind it and what to do about it
You check Hacker News before your coffee is ready.
Not because you want to. Because you’re afraid of what you’ll miss if you don’t.
A new agent framework. Someone automated their workflow overnight. A founder you follow just shipped in a weekend what used to take three months.
You close the tab, open your laptop, and feel something that wasn’t there six months ago.
Pressure.
Andrej Karpathy recently described it in two words: “AI psychosis.”
A lot of people in tech are feeling some version of this. Not because they’re fragile. Because they’re paying attention.
What AI Psychosis Actually Is
AI psychosis isn’t a clinical diagnosis. It’s a useful name for a specific experience spreading through high-skill industries:
The sense that capability is expanding infinitely, your ability to keep up is limited, and the gap is your fault.
When an AI tool fails to deliver, the thought isn’t “the technology has limits.” It’s: I didn’t configure it right. I didn’t write the right prompt. I didn’t find the right workflow. The failure reflects back.
This creates a loop that doesn’t close.
Tools improve → you feel behind → you push harder → the gap grows again.
There’s no endpoint. No moment where you catch up and it settles.
So your system stays activated.
What makes this pattern particularly destabilizing is not just the pace of change. It’s the breakdown of a familiar equation.
For years, getting better at your craft meant becoming more capable and more secure. Those things moved together. When that link breaks, the anxiety shifts character. It’s no longer about keeping up with a deadline. It’s about not being able to trust the system you used to measure yourself.
Regular stress resolves. A project ships, a deadline passes, the threat ends. Your nervous system can get used to dealing with threats that rise and end.
But a threat with no endpoint, where the goalpost resets the moment you reach it, is something the nervous system can’t adapt to.
Stress researcher Bruce McEwen called this allostatic load: the cumulative physiological cost of sustained activation with no recovery window.
Your nervous system isn’t overreacting. It’s responding normally to conditions it was never designed to handle.
Are You Still an Engineer If You Don’t Write Code?
This is the question nobody wants to say out loud.
Karpathy admitted he hasn’t typed a line of code since December. He directs AI agents now. For someone whose identity was built on being a brilliant programmer, that’s not a workflow update. It’s an existential shift.
And he’s navigating it from a position of extraordinary expertise. For most people, the disruption cuts deeper.
When the skills that define your career become automated, something happens beyond professional concern. Your competence narrative breaks.
You spent years becoming excellent at something. A tool now approximates it in minutes. The rational response is “I’ll adapt.” The one that keeps you up at night is “Am I training the thing that’s going to replace me?”
That response isn’t irrational. The uncertainty is real, and the future is difficult to predict.
Comparison becomes corrosive too.
Social media surfaces everyone who’s adapting seamlessly. What you don’t see is that they’re posting through the same anxiety you’re feeling. Karpathy showed this.
Rest starts to feel like falling behind. If the AI can work while you sleep, every hour of rest is an hour you didn’t use.
That feeling is a distortion. It comes from an old equation: more effort used to lead to more security.
When that equation breaks, your brain treats rest like a risk instead of a necessity.
And at 2 AM, that logic feels completely real.
Why the Most Capable People Feel This the Hardest
This pattern hits high performers disproportionately. Because they understand what’s happening clearly enough to feel the full weight of it.
They can see what the tools can do, what they should be able to do with them, and the gap between those two things. And they take that gap personally, because they always have. That habit is what made them good.
Karpathy described feeling nervous when his AI subscriptions had unused capacity, as if idle compute was a personal failure. That’s worth holding onto.
High performers also tend to treat discomfort as information that they’re not working hard enough. That interpretation is the trap.
More effort doesn’t close a loop that can’t be closed. It just keeps the nervous system activated longer.
What Actually Helps
Name the pattern precisely, not vaguely
Vague stress keeps you stuck. Precision creates clarity.
“AI psychosis” landed because it named the experience directly instead of leaving it as ambient unease. When you can name what’s happening, you can look at it instead of being inside it.
Try this: write down the three thoughts that loop most often when you can’t sleep. Not solutions. Not action items. Just the thoughts themselves. Seeing them on paper shifts your position relative to them.
They become something you’re observing rather than something you’re fully inside.
Distinguish learning from monitoring
These feel like the same activity. They aren’t.
Learning is applied. You acquire something, use it, build skill, get feedback. The loop closes.
Monitoring is scanning for threats with no application endpoint. You consume, compare, consume again. The loop stays open, which means the threat signal stays on.
Monitoring feels like staying informed. Functionally, it keeps the alarm system running.
If you’re constantly checking for updates, jumping between tools, or consuming more than you’re applying, you’ve likely crossed from learning into monitoring without noticing.
The key questions:
-Are you applying new learning or just consuming more information?
-Are you consuming content or using content to create or build?
Information consumption doesn’t build capacity. It burns it. Left unchecked, it stops being input and becomes load.
Correct the attribution error, not just the feeling
The anxiety in this pattern isn’t just fear of falling behind. At a deeper level, it’s a misattribution of what made you effective in the first place.
High performers tend to credit their skills at execution: the code they wrote, the systems they built, the throughput they produced.
Those things were visible and measurable, so they became the story. But what actually produced the outcomes was the judgment underneath the execution.
What to build, why to build it, what the customer really needed, what would break in production, what the data was actually saying. That layer is invisible in the day-to-day, which makes it easy to lose track of.
When AI compresses the execution layer, the anxiety response is “my value is shrinking.” The more accurate read is “the execution layer has changed. My actual core value hasn’t.”
This isn’t semantic. It changes where you look for evidence of your value.
The practical move: think back to the last year and pick two or three decisions where your judgment, vision or taste actually shaped what happened. The kind where you read the situation, made a call, and it mattered. Write them down. That’s where your value lives.
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Work with the body, not just the thinking
This pattern shows up physically: waking at 3 AM with a racing mind, jaw tension, difficulty concentrating on anything that isn’t work-related. These are the marks of nervous system that has been chronically over-activated.
The reason somatic-based therapies and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) work for this pattern specifically is that the body’s threat response runs faster than conscious thought.
You can’t think your way to calm when the activation is running underneath the thinking.
That’s why the 3 AM mind-race doesn’t respond to logic — you’ve already told yourself the situation is manageable, and you’re still awake at 3:15. Regulation has to come through the body first. Slow breath, physical grounding, deliberate sensory attention.
Find a therapist who understands the context
The isolation is one of the harder parts. Karpathy described trying to explain the AI shift to his parents and getting blank stares. “A normal person doesn’t realize this happened.”
This extends to therapy. Research on occupational identity disruption, including work by sociologist Ofer Sharone on professional setbacks and self-blame, shows that people in high-skill fields consistently internalize structural disruption as personal failure.
Clinicians who work regularly with tech professionals see this manifest in a specific way: it’s not catastrophizing, and it’s not ordinary burnout. It’s a combination of identity disruption, hypervigilance masked as productivity, and the inability to locate a clear endpoint for the threat.
Treating it like garden-variety work stress misses what’s actually going on.
What to say when you’re looking: “My field is going through a rapid technology shift that’s changing what my job looks like. I’m dealing with anxiety about keeping up, and it’s affecting my sleep, my focus, and how I feel about my own capabilities. I need someone who takes that seriously and understands it’s not exaggeration.”
That framing will tell you quickly whether the therapist gets it.
If You Lead a Team, Pay Attention
The people who seem fine may be running on anxiety. The ones working nonstop may not be driven. They may be unable to stop.
Neither shows up in a performance review.
What does show up eventually: burnout, quiet disengagement, people leaving without fully explaining why.
The most useful thing a leader can do right now is make this conversation possible. Not through a wellness seminar. Through being direct: “This is a disorienting moment. I don’t think everyone is handling it fine. If you’re not, that doesn’t say anything about your ability.” That’s the opening. It doesn’t require a program. It requires someone senior enough checking in and explicitly addressing the elephant in the room.
When to Consider Talking to Someone
Most people who would benefit from therapy in this pattern aren’t asking themselves “should I get help?” They’re asking “am I bad enough to justify it?” That’s the wrong question, and it’s part of the pattern itself.
High performers have a high threshold for pain. And for admitting that something isn’t working.
A useful reframe: if the anxiety has started to drive your decisions rather than inform them, it’s worth talking to someone.
If you’re checking tools or news compulsively outside work hours, if sleep disruption is consistent rather than occasional, if you feel behind regardless of output, or if the question of your long-term value feels paralyzing rather than motivating — those aren’t signs of weakness. They’re signs that the pressure has exceeded what self-management alone can hold.
Therapy for this isn’t about slowing down. It’s about getting your judgment back in front of your reactions.
The Takeaway
The painful part of this pattern: the system you used to measure progress has stopped giving reliable readings.
Effort used to compound. Now it feels like it evaporates. That’s a genuine psychological disruption, not a cognitive distortion to be corrected away.
Most people working through this aren’t breaking. They’re adapting under pressure that doesn’t turn off, and absorbing the cost in ways they may not fully register until they have to.
The personal cost is high, and it compounds the longer it goes unaddressed.
We Work With People Going Through Exactly This
At Manhattan Mental Health Counseling, we work with professionals navigating this pattern: the anxiety, the identity disruption, and the inability to disengage.
You won’t need to explain the industry context. We understand it. If any of this resonated, therapy can help you step out of the pattern without stepping away from your ambition.
Online sessions available throughout New York State.
Manhattan Mental Health Counseling specializes in anxiety, professional burnout, and the unique pressures of high-performance careers. We provide online therapy across New York State with clinicians trained in CBT, somatic therapy, mindfulness-based approaches, and DBT who understand the intersection of technology, ambition, and mental health. Visit manhattanmentalhealthcounseling.com to get started.
