Jon Fernquest

ML-enhanced Flashcard Web Apps, Digital Journalism, Sanskrit, Pali, Burmese, Tai Languages and History. Agent-based modeling applied to contagions of violence.

[Mr. Buzzoni @polydao]

KARPATHY WROTE THIS DOCUMENT TO COMPLETELY AUTOMATE OBSIDIAN WITH CLAUDE

I was ready to abandon my second brain

manual cross-referencing was destroying my workflow, but finding this exact document opened my eyes to a completely different approach

it is incredibly convenient -> Karpathy's method turns the AI into a full-time maintainer for your Zettelkasten:

> the LLM reads every new source and integrates it into a structured wiki
> Obsidian becomes your visual IDE while Claude operates as the backend
> the agent runs automated checks to find contradictions across your notes
> your entire vault compounds automatically without you typing a single link

the friction is completely gone. I just feed it raw documents and the agent organizes my entire life

here is the official document from Karpathy explaining the architecture 👇

[Harrison Chase @hwchase17]

Harness: ✅ (DeepAgents)
Sandboxes: ✅ (LangSmith Sandboxes)
Eval: ✅ (LangSmith Sandboxes
Model: integrate with all the popular models and providers

Plus we have the engine that helps you turn this flywheel: LangSmith Engine https://t.co/NLeUafWZtz

own your agents!

[Raytar @Raytar]

My friend makes $1.2 million a year as an Anthropic engineer.

I asked him how he learned prompting so well.

He sent me a video that was never supposed to get out. Their core team's prompting playbook.

You won’t find anything better about prompting than this video.

I watched it last night.

Halfway through, I realized I've been using Claude completely wrong for two years.

Watch it, then read the article below.

[Movez @0xMovez]

Ex-Google engineer explained AI agent loops, harness, evals in 20 minutes - better than 500$ courses.

trace every run → judge it with an LLM → diagnose → fix → ship.

That loop is how agents self-improve over time.

Agent loops + memory + harness + evals - thats the stack.

Watch it, then save the framework below.

[Anuj @anujcodes_21]

🚨Anthropic just showed a 24-minute workshop on how to actually do prompts for Claude.

Taught by the people who built it.

Free. No registration. No paywall.

I've seen $300 courses that don't cover what they teach in the first 8 minutes.

Watch it and bookmark it now.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

This works really well btw, at the end of your query ask your LLM to "structure your response as HTML", then view the generated file in your browser. I've also had some success asking the LLM to present its output as slideshows, etc.

More generally, imo audio is the human-preferred input to AIs but vision (images/animations/video) is the preferred output from them. Around a ~third of our brains are a massively parallel processor dedicated to vision, it is the 10-lane superhighway of information into brain. As AI improves, I think we'll see a progression that takes advantage:

1) raw text (hard/effortful to read)
2) markdown (bold, italic, headings, tables, a bit easier on the eyes) <-- current default
3) HTML (still procedural with underlying code, but a lot more flexibility on the graphics, layout, even interactivity) <-- early but forming new good default
...4,5,6,...
n) interactive neural videos/simulations

Imo the extrapolation (though the technology doesn't exist just yet) ends in some kind of interactive videos generated directly by a diffusion neural net. Many open questions as to how exact/procedural "Software 1.0" artifacts (e.g. interactive simulations) may be woven together with neural artifacts (diffusion grids), but generally something in the direction of the recently viral https://t.co/z21CP5iQfu

There are also improvements necessary and pending at the input. Audio nor text nor video alone are not enough, e.g. I feel a need to point/gesture to things on the screen, similar to all the things you would do with a person physically next to you and your computer screen.

TLDR The input/output mind meld between humans and AIs is ongoing and there is a lot of work to do and significant progress to be made, way before jumping all the way into neuralink-esque BCIs and all that. For what's worth exploring at the current stage, hot tip try ask for HTML.

[Jon Fernquest @FernquestJon]

@karpathy Must own and thus thoroughly understand the work as the AI agent is only collaborator and co-author.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

This is the the quote I've been citing a lot recently.

[Jon Fernquest @FernquestJon]

Then in beautiful typeset LaTeX create a masterwork textbook on a certain narrow topic based on one's expertise

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Farzapedia, personal wikipedia of Farza, good example following my Wiki LLM tweet.

I really like this approach to personalization in a number of ways, compared to "status quo" of an AI that allegedly gets better the more you use it or something:

1. Explicit. The memory artifact is explicit and navigable (the wiki), you can see exactly what the AI does and does not know and you can inspect and manage this artifact, even if you don't do the direct text writing (the LLM does). The knowledge of you is not implicit and unknown, it's explicit and viewable.
2. Yours. Your data is yours, on your local computer, it's not in some particular AI provider's system without the ability to extract it. You're in control of your information.
3. File over app. The memory here is a simple collection of files in universal formats (images, markdown). This means the data is interoperable: you can use a very large collection of tools/CLIs or whatever you want over this information because it's just files. The agents can apply the entire Unix toolkit over them. They can natively read and understand them. Any kind of data can be imported into files as input, and any kind of interface can be used to view them as the output. E.g. you can use Obsidian to view them or vibe code something of your own. Search "File over app" for an article on this philosophy.
4. BYOAI. You can use whatever AI you want to "plug into" this information - Claude, Codex, OpenCode, whatever. You can even think about taking an open source AI and finetuning it on your wiki - in principle, this AI could "know" you in its weights, not just attend over your data.

So this approach to personalization puts *you* in full control. The data is yours. In Universal formats. Explicit and inspectable. Use whatever AI you want over it, keep the AI companies on their toes! :)

Certainly this is not the simplest way to get an AI to know you - it does require you to manage file directories and so on, but agents also make it quite simple and they can help you a lot. I imagine a number of products might come out to make this all easier, but imo "agent proficiency" is a CORE SKILL of the 21st century. These are extremely powerful tools - they speak English and they do all the computer stuff for you. Try this opportunity to play with one.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Farzapedia, personal wikipedia of Farza, good example following my Wiki LLM tweet.

I really like this approach to personalization in a number of ways, compared to "status quo" of an AI that allegedly gets better the more you use it or something:

1. Explicit. The memory artifact is explicit and navigable (the wiki), you can see exactly what the AI does and does not know and you can inspect and manage this artifact, even if you don't do the direct text writing (the LLM does). The knowledge of you is not implicit and unknown, it's explicit and viewable.
2. Yours. Your data is yours, on your local computer, it's not in some particular AI provider's system without the ability to extract it. You're in control of your information.
3. File over app. The memory here is a simple collection of files in universal formats (images, markdown). This means the data is interoperable: you can use a very large collection of tools/CLIs or whatever you want over this information because it's just files. The agents can apply the entire Unix toolkit over them. They can natively read and understand them. Any kind of data can be imported into files as input, and any kind of interface can be used to view them as the output. E.g. you can use Obsidian to view them or vibe code something of your own. Search "File over app" for an article on this philosophy.
4. BYOAI. You can use whatever AI you want to "plug into" this information - Claude, Codex, OpenCode, whatever. You can even think about taking an open source AI and finetuning it on your wiki - in principle, this AI could "know" you in its weights, not just attend over your data.

So this approach to personalization puts *you* in full control. The data is yours. In Universal formats. Explicit and inspectable. Use whatever AI you want over it, keep the AI companies on their toes! :)

Certainly this is not the simplest way to get an AI to know you - it does require you to manage file directories and so on, but agents also make it quite simple and they can help you a lot. I imagine a number of products might come out to make this all easier, but imo "agent proficiency" is a CORE SKILL of the 21st century. These are extremely powerful tools - they speak English and they do all the computer stuff for you. Try this opportunity to play with one.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Something I've been thinking about - I am bullish on people (empowered by AI) increasing the visibility, legibility and accountability of their governments.

Historically, it is the governments that act to make society legible (e.g. "Seeing like a state" is the common reference), but with AI, society can dramatically improve its ability to do this in reverse. Government accountability has not been constrained by access (the various branches of government publish an enormous amount of data), it has been constrained by intelligence - the ability to process a lot of raw data, combine it with domain expertise and derive insights. As an example, the 4000-page omnibus bill is "transparent" in principle and in a legal sense, but certainly not in a practical sense for most people. There's a lot more like it: laws, spending bills, federal budgets, freedom of information act responses, lobbying disclosures... Only a few highly trained professionals (investigative journalists) could historically process this information. This bottleneck might dissolve - not only are the professionals further empowered, but a lot more people can participate.

Some examples to be precise: Detailed accounting of spending and budgets, diff tracking of legislation, individual voting trends w.r.t. stated positions or speeches, lobbying and influence (e.g. graph of lobbyist -> firm -> client -> legislator -> committee -> vote -> regulation), procurement and contracting, regulatory capture warning lights, judicial and legal patterns, campaign finance... Local governments might be even more interesting because the governed population is smaller so there is less national coverage: city council meetings, decisions around zoning, policing, schools, utilities...

Certainly, the same tools can easily cut the other way and it's worth being very mindful of that, but I lean optimistic overall that added participation, transparency and accountability will improve democratic, free societies.

(the quoted tweet is half-ish related, but inspired me to post some recent thoughts)

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Wow, this tweet went very viral!

I wanted share a possibly slightly improved version of the tweet in an "idea file". The idea of the idea file is that in this era of LLM agents, there is less of a point/need of sharing the specific code/app, you just share the idea, then the other person's agent customizes & builds it for your specific needs.

So here's the idea in a gist format: https://t.co/NlAfEJjtJV

You can give this to your agent and it can build you your own LLM wiki and guide you on how to use it etc. It's intentionally kept a little bit abstract/vague because there are so many directions to take this in. And ofc, people can adjust the idea or contribute their own in the Discussion which is cool.

[elvis @omarsar0]

NEW AI report from Google.

Every prior intelligence explosion in human history was social, not individual.

These authors make the case that the AI "singularity" framed as a single superintelligent mind bootstrapping to godlike intelligence is fundamentally wrong.

This is directly relevant to anyone designing multi-agent systems.

They observe that frontier reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 spontaneously develop internal "societies of thought," multi-agent debates among cognitive perspectives, through RL alone.

The path forward is human-AI configurations and agent institutions, not bigger monolithic oracles.

This reframes AI scaling strategy from "build bigger models" to "compose richer social systems."

It argues governance of AI agents should follow institutional design principles, checks and balances, role protocols, rather than individual alignment.

Paper: https://t.co/bfwrnbkY2y

Learn to build effective AI agents in our academy: https://t.co/1e8RZKs4uX

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

LLM Knowledge Bases

Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it. So:

Data ingest:
I index source documents (articles, papers, repos, datasets, images, etc.) into a raw/ directory, then I use an LLM to incrementally "compile" a wiki, which is just a collection of .md files in a directory structure. The wiki includes summaries of all the data in raw/, backlinks, and then it categorizes data into concepts, writes articles for them, and links them all. To convert web articles into .md files I like to use the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, and then I also use a hotkey to download all the related images to local so that my LLM can easily reference them.

IDE:
I use Obsidian as the IDE "frontend" where I can view the raw data, the the compiled wiki, and the derived visualizations. Important to note that the LLM writes and maintains all of the data of the wiki, I rarely touch it directly. I've played with a few Obsidian plugins to render and view data in other ways (e.g. Marp for slides).

Q&A:
Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough (e.g. mine on some recent research is ~100 articles and ~400K words), you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc. I thought I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good about auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all the documents and it reads all the important related data fairly easily at this ~small scale.

Output:
Instead of getting answers in text/terminal, I like to have it render markdown files for me, or slide shows (Marp format), or matplotlib images, all of which I then view again in Obsidian. You can imagine many other visual output formats depending on the query. Often, I end up "filing" the outputs back into the wiki to enhance it for further queries. So my own explorations and queries always "add up" in the knowledge base.

Linting:
I've run some LLM "health checks" over the wiki to e.g. find inconsistent data, impute missing data (with web searchers), find interesting connections for new article candidates, etc., to incrementally clean up the wiki and enhance its overall data integrity. The LLMs are quite good at suggesting further questions to ask and look into.

Extra tools:
I find myself developing additional tools to process the data, e.g. I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki, which I both use directly (in a web ui), but more often I want to hand it off to an LLM via CLI as a tool for larger queries.

Further explorations:
As the repo grows, the natural desire is to also think about synthetic data generation + finetuning to have your LLM "know" the data in its weights instead of just context windows.

TLDR: raw data from a given number of sources is collected, then compiled by an LLM into a .md wiki, then operated on by various CLIs by the LLM to do Q&A and to incrementally enhance the wiki, and all of it viewable in Obsidian. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually, it's the domain of the LLM. I think there is room here for an incredible new product instead of a hacky collection of scripts.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

- Drafted a blog post
- Used an LLM to meticulously improve the argument over 4 hours.
- Wow, feeling great, it’s so convincing!
- Fun idea let’s ask it to argue the opposite.
- LLM demolishes the entire argument and convinces me that the opposite is in fact true.
- lol

The LLMs may elicit an opinion when asked but are extremely competent in arguing almost any direction. This is actually super useful as a tool for forming your own opinions, just make sure to ask different directions and be careful with the sycophancy.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

One common issue with personalization in all LLMs is how distracting memory seems to be for the models. A single question from 2 months ago about some topic can keep coming up as some kind of a deep interest of mine with undue mentions in perpetuity. Some kind of trying too hard.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Software horror: litellm PyPI supply chain attack.

Simple `pip install litellm` was enough to exfiltrate SSH keys, AWS/GCP/Azure creds, Kubernetes configs, git credentials, env vars (all your API keys), shell history, crypto wallets, SSL private keys, CI/CD secrets, database passwords.

LiteLLM itself has 97 million downloads per month which is already terrible, but much worse, the contagion spreads to any project that depends on litellm. For example, if you did `pip install dspy` (which depended on litellm>=1.64.0), you'd also be pwnd. Same for any other large project that depended on litellm.

Afaict the poisoned version was up for only less than ~1 hour. The attack had a bug which led to its discovery - Callum McMahon was using an MCP plugin inside Cursor that pulled in litellm as a transitive dependency. When litellm 1.82.8 installed, their machine ran out of RAM and crashed. So if the attacker didn't vibe code this attack it could have been undetected for many days or weeks.

Supply chain attacks like this are basically the scariest thing imaginable in modern software. Every time you install any depedency you could be pulling in a poisoned package anywhere deep inside its entire depedency tree. This is especially risky with large projects that might have lots and lots of dependencies. The credentials that do get stolen in each attack can then be used to take over more accounts and compromise more packages.

Classical software engineering would have you believe that dependencies are good (we're building pyramids from bricks), but imo this has to be re-evaluated, and it's why I've been so growingly averse to them, preferring to use LLMs to "yoink" functionality when it's simple enough and possible.

[Ravid Shwartz Ziv @ziv_ravid]

Soatto vs LeCun: Are LLMs World Models?🧐

[Paul Graham @paulg]

This is the new thing that Amjad showed me a couple weeks ago. It generalizes the idea of vibe coding beyond what people usually think of as coding.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Sometimes when a startup wants to escape from a bad organization that has some claim on their IP, it's worth rewriting their software from scratch in a "clean room." AI-assisted programming will make this much easier.