Karpathy is telling you something most product teams haven’t internalized yet.
The new distribution channel for software is agents. Agents don’t browse your marketing site, watch your demo video, or click through your onboarding flow. They call your CLI. They hit your MCP server. They read your docs programmatically. If none of those surface areas exist, your product is invisible to them.
Look at how fast this moved. MCP went from zero to 97 million monthly SDK downloads in twelve months. 10,000+ active servers. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and Cloudflare all adopted it. By December 2025, Anthropic donated MCP to the Linux Foundation because the standard had already won. Running an MCP server is now compared to running a web server.
That’s the new baseline for product discovery.
85% of enterprises are expected to have AI agents deployed. Those agents need structured, programmatic access to your product. They need CLIs, MCP endpoints, and machine-readable documentation. A beautiful React dashboard is worthless to an agent trying to pull data into a workflow at 3am.
This tells you everything about why Karpathy’s framing of CLIs as “legacy” technology is so precise. Legacy means battle-tested, standardized, universally parseable. stdin/stdout, flags, JSON output. The entire Unix philosophy was accidentally designed for AI agents decades before they existed.
Your competitor ships an MCP server and suddenly every Claude Code user, every Cursor session, every autonomous workflow can discover and use their product. No human ever visits the website. No sales call. No onboarding email. The agent just finds the tool and starts using it.
The companies that win the next 24 months are the ones building agent-accessible surface area right now. The ones that lose are still optimizing their landing page above the fold.
Thanks @_javierivero for hosting the @cursor_ai meet up today at @stripe offices in Mexico City. Very cool to connect with talented people building interesting stuff with AI #aibuildersmx
We want solutions, but what we need are attitudes.
You don't need abs, but rather an attitude of training. You don't need an answer, but rather an attitude of curiosity. You don't need an easier life, but rather an attitude of perseverance.
Attitude precedes outcome
@JamesClear
"Good decision-makers understand a simple truth: you can't make good decisions without good thinking, and good thinking requires time."
https://t.co/1TBRl9Ja13
One heuristic to tell how good someone is at making decisions is how much time they have. The busiest people are often the ones who make the worst decisions. They have less time to dedicate to thinking about the problem, and are often busy correcting poor decisions from the past.
Bill Gates explains why AI is as revolutionary as personal computers, mobile phones, and the Internet, and he gives three principles for how to think about it. https://t.co/isnDVe5tfN via @billgates
“La opinión es la forma mas baja del conocimiento humano. No asume responsabilidad ni entendimiento. La forma mas alta es la empatía pues nos requiere que suspendamos nuestros egos y vivamos en el mundo de alguien más.”
- Bill Bullard
@osotrava
https://t.co/2OGkwm5yOi
Mental toughness is often portrayed as determination and persistence, but it can also be flexibility & adaptability.
- I can be happy anywhere
- I can work with what I have
You are tough when your mood is not dependent on your conditions
@JamesClear