Andrej Karpathy

Don't think of LLMs as entities but as simulators. For example, when exploring a topic, don't ask:

"What do you think about xyz"?

There is no "you". Next time try:

"What would be a good group of people to explore xyz? What would they say?"

The LLM can channel/simulate many

ely work going into engineering the "you" simulation - the personality that gets all the rewards in verifiable problems, or all the upvotes from users/judge LLMs, or mimics the responses of SFT, and there is an emergent composite personality from that. My point is more that the "

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become

It’s very good. People who aren’t keeping up even over the last 30 days already have a deprecated world view on this topic.

I have similar experiences. You point the thing around and it shoots pellets or sometimes even misfires and then once in a while when you hold it just right a powerful beam of laser erupts and melts your problem.

Very good questions imo experienced devs have a real advantage but only if they rapidly progress through their grief cycle and adapt, now and onwards. Categorically rejecting or ignoring the new layer would be a mistake.

Agency &gt; Intelligence

I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are

A few random notes from claude coding quite a bit last few weeks.

Coding workflow. Given the latest lift in LLM coding capability, like many others I rapidly went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in

💯 @ Spec-driven development
It's the limit of imperative -&gt; declarative transition, basically being declarative entirely.

Relatedly my mind was recently blown by  , extreme and early but inspiring example.

Love the word "comprehension debt", haven't encountered it so far, it's very accurate. It's so very tempting to just move on when the LLM one-shotted something that seems to work ok.

The nearest neighbor really is some kind of a junior engineer. Its ideas about what experiments to run on e.g. nanochat have been surprisingly bad, but its execution on ideas I've given it have been surprisingly good.

It feels like I’m cheating. Which is a very weird feeling to have. It takes a while to unpack. It’s because some code that used to be a point of pride and high IQ and knowledge is suddenly free and instant and it’s very disorienting.

+1 for "context engineering" over "prompt engineering".

People associate prompts with short task descriptions you'd give an LLM in your day-to-day use. When in every industrial-strength LLM app, context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window

Haha I'm not trying to coin a new word or something. I just think people's use of "prompt" tends to (incorrectly) trivialize a rather complex component. You prompt an LLM to tell you why the sky is blue. But apps build contexts (meticulously) for LLMs to solve their custom tasks.