AI Fever#

Published on March 26, 2026

Bold take: I think Andrej Karpathy nailed the symptoms but got the diagnosis wrong.

Andrej went on the No Priors podcast last week and told the world he's in a "state of psychosis." He hasn't typed a line of code since December. He runs 10–20 AI agents in parallel. He feels anxious when tokens go unused. He can't stop.

"AI psychosis" is already a term in psychiatry — it describes people developing grandiose delusions, parasocial attachment, and detachment from reality through chatbot interactions. That's a real and serious phenomenon. What Karpathy describes is the exact opposite. He's not losing touch with reality. He's overwhelmed by how much reality just expanded.

Two weeks ago, Frank Contrepois coined "agentic fever". Frank Contrepois describes the specific burnout of constantly orchestrating AI agents, the anxiety of stepping away. I think this is closer, but not exactly the full picture.

What's happening right now is exactly what happened during the gold rush — to individuals.

The five forces of AI fever#

In 1848, a carpenter found gold at Sutter's Mill. Within a year, 300,000 people had dropped everything and headed west.

The individual who dropped everything, worked 16-hour days in freezing water, and couldn't stop — because the gold was real, the window was finite, and rest meant someone else was claiming your stake.

They had gold fever. We all have AI fever now (and if nobody coined that yet, I'm happy to take credit 🤪). Here are the mechanisms involved:

Empowerment — "I finally can." For the first time, an ordinary person could get rich without capital, connections, or permission. A pan and a river was enough. The barrier collapsed overnight. That's the same empowerment people feel right now. One person with a prompt and an agent can ship what took a team six months ago. Karpathy went from writing 80% of his code to writing 0% in three months — and the output got better. When you discover you can suddenly do 10x more, your brain doesn't want to stop. It wants to find the ceiling.

Urgency — "I have to do this now." Gold fever wasn't just individual ambition. It was amplified by a collective urgency. Someone else is heading west. Someone else is staking claims. The window is open but it won't stay open forever. This is the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) layer — but calling it FOMO undersells it. During the gold rush, speed literally determined who got rich and who got nothing. The best claims went to whoever showed up first. Right now, people building agent workflows are accumulating skills, intuitions, and systems that compound daily. The gap between someone who started in December and someone starting today is already enormous.

Amplification — "Gold! Gold! Gold!" Gold fever didn't spread organically — it exploded because of media. Sam Brannan walked down San Francisco's Montgomery Street holding a bottle of gold flakes, shouting "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!" Newspapers sensationalized it. That's when the national mania truly ignited. We're seeing the same cycle with AI. YouTube, LinkedIn, Threads, and the news are flooded with agent demos, capability announcements, and stories of solo builders shipping products that would have taken teams a year ago. Every viral thread is another Sam Brannan moment — and worth noting, Brannan wasn't a miner. He owned the supply store. He amplified the fever to sell pickaxes.

Contagion — "Everyone is going west." Psychology research on gold fever describes it as "a form of mass anxiety where not participating seemed like an act of folly." People went west because other people were going west. That social contagion — where the fever feeds itself independently of the underlying opportunity — hasn't fully hit AI yet. But it's coming up fast. When your non-technical friends start asking about agents, when your parents forward you an AI article, when hiring managers list "agent orchestration" as a requirement — that's the contagion phase. The fever stops being about capability and starts being about not getting left behind.

Identity crisis — "I can't go back." Miners who gave up everything often couldn't return to their old lives even when the gold ran out. They had changed. Their skills, their expectations, their sense of what's possible — all rewired. Karpathy literally says he can't go back to writing code by hand. Once you've experienced 10x leverage, the old way feels broken. This is hitting engineers inside companies too. When AI handles 80% of the building, what are you? A manager? A reviewer? A prompt architect? The role you trained for, the identity you built over years — it's shifting under your feet, and there's no going back to the version of yourself that didn't know this was possible.

Karpathy and Contrepois are both describing the individual compulsion, the inability to step away. What makes this a fever are the same forces that caused gold fever back in the 1848 rush — empowerment, urgency, amplification, contagion, and an identity shift so deep you can't return to who you were before. Everyone around you is moving. The tools are getting better weekly. The cost of inaction feels higher every day. And even if you wanted to stop, you've already changed.

It's 1am. I want to get up early and hit the gym. I have a young baby. And yet my brain won't stop spinning. I know exactly what Andrej Karpathy is talking about. I don't think he's sick. I think we all are. I think the gold is real.