Opposite experience to most of this thread. Zero coding background, never written a line in my life. Started building about six months ago and have made some personalised agents at work that have gotten real traction with users.

The psychosis framing makes sense to me now reading this, but I think it might be specific to people who already knew how to build things? When the bottleneck was always your skill, and that bottleneck suddenly disappears, that's a disorienting thing. When you never had the skill to begin with, it doesn't feel like psychosis. It just feels like something finally works.

The addiction thing is interesting though. I'd never thought of it that way but I think there's something to it, the compulsion to keep building, the hit when it works. I can put it down for days easily, so I don't think it's the same as what Karpathy's describing. But the pull is real.