Andrej Karpathy has revealed 'Dobby the House Elf claw' — a personal AI agent that controls his home's sound system, lighting, security, shades, HVAC, pool, and spa. He interacts with Dobby by sending natural language messages via WhatsApp.
Dobby supports macro actions — for example, 'Dobby it's sleepy time' triggers all lights off, shades down, thermostat adjusted, and music stopped across five different device ecosystems, through a single WhatsApp message. It also uses security cameras to detect events like FedEx deliveries and sends proactive alerts.
Karpathy coined the term 'claws' in March 2026 to describe persistent autonomous agents that run independently in their own sandbox environment with sophisticated long-term memory and communication protocols like WhatsApp.
Perhaps most striking: Karpathy revealed he hasn't typed a line of code since December 2025. Back then he noticed he was writing just 20% of his code with 80% delegated to an agent — and then stopped coding entirely. He described going through 'claw psychosis' in January while integrating the agent with various smart home functions.
The OpenAI co-founder who led Tesla's Autopilot team and is one of the most respected AI researchers in the world now delegates all his coding to AI agents. This personal experience directly reinforces his public statements about the 'agent era.'
Dobby represents the emerging category of AI agents that go beyond chat to take real actions in the physical world — controlling actual devices, monitoring cameras, and managing home systems autonomously.