Alexandre Gonçalves

AI Engineer

[Alexandre Gonçalves @oAlexgonca]

@karpathy Congrats Andrej!!

[Alexandre Gonçalves @oAlexgonca]

/goal is actually really nice in codex
you can actually use it in the app as well just by typing it (though it doesn’t show up as a suggestion)

[Alexandre Gonçalves @oAlexgonca]

closing loops is oddly satisfying

[Alexandre Gonçalves @oAlexgonca]

@feulf @pcbo I like the guy with the white shirt

[Alexandre Gonçalves @oAlexgonca]

@avenceslau @mattzcarey Great meeting you two! Learned a lot

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Agency > 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 we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency?

Grok explanation is ~close:

“Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path.

People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next.

It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”

[FFmpeg @FFmpeg]

Thank you to @AnthropicAI for sending FFmpeg patches

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

As a fun Saturday vibe code project and following up on this tweet earlier, I hacked up an **llm-council** web app. It looks exactly like ChatGPT except each user query is 1) dispatched to multiple models on your council using OpenRouter, e.g. currently:

"openai/gpt-5.1",
"google/gemini-3-pro-preview",
"anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5",
"x-ai/grok-4",

Then 2) all models get to see each other's (anonymized) responses and they review and rank them, and then 3) a "Chairman LLM" gets all of that as context and produces the final response.

It's interesting to see the results from multiple models side by side on the same query, and even more amusingly, to read through their evaluation and ranking of each other's responses.

Quite often, the models are surprisingly willing to select another LLM's response as superior to their own, making this an interesting model evaluation strategy more generally. For example, reading book chapters together with my LLM Council today, the models consistently praise GPT 5.1 as the best and most insightful model, and consistently select Claude as the worst model, with the other models floating in between. But I'm not 100% convinced this aligns with my own qualitative assessment. For example, qualitatively I find GPT 5.1 a little too wordy and sprawled and Gemini 3 a bit more condensed and processed. Claude is too terse in this domain.

That said, there's probably a whole design space of the data flow of your LLM council. The construction of LLM ensembles seems under-explored.

I pushed the vibe coded app to
https://t.co/EZyOqwXd2k
if others would like to play. ty nano banana pro for fun header image for the repo

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

+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 with just the right information for the next step. Science because doing this right involves task descriptions and explanations, few shot examples, RAG, related (possibly multimodal) data, tools, state and history, compacting... Too little or of the wrong form and the LLM doesn't have the right context for optimal performance. Too much or too irrelevant and the LLM costs might go up and performance might come down. Doing this well is highly non-trivial. And art because of the guiding intuition around LLM psychology of people spirits.

On top of context engineering itself, an LLM app has to:
- break up problems just right into control flows
- pack the context windows just right
- dispatch calls to LLMs of the right kind and capability
- handle generation-verification UIUX flows
- a lot more - guardrails, security, evals, parallelism, prefetching, ...

So context engineering is just one small piece of an emerging thick layer of non-trivial software that coordinates individual LLM calls (and a lot more) into full LLM apps. The term "ChatGPT wrapper" is tired and really, really wrong.

[Alexandre Gonçalves @oAlexgonca]

Context engineering.

[Google DeepMind @GoogleDeepMind]

The latest version of 2.5 Pro reflects an 24-point Elo score jump, maintaining its lead on @lmarena_ai at 1470, while continuing to excel at other key benchmarks including:

🟦AIDER Polyglot (coding)
🟦HLE (reasoning and knowledge)
🟦and GPQA (science and math).

↓
https://t.co/J1BDjWbqRc

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

An attempt to explain (current) ChatGPT versions.

I still run into many, many people who don't know that:
- o3 is the obvious best thing for important/hard things. It is a reasoning model that is much stronger than 4o and if you are using ChatGPT professionally and not using o3 you're ngmi.
- 4o is different from o4. Yes I know lol. 4o is a good "daily driver" for many easy-medium questions. o4 is only available as mini for now, and is not as good as o3, and I'm not super sure why it's out right now.

Example basic "router" in my own personal use:
- Any simple query (e.g. "what foods are high in fiber"?) => 4o (about ~40% of my use)
- Any hard/important enough query where I am willing to wait a bit (e.g. "help me understand this tax thing...") => o3 (about ~40% of my use)
- I am vibe coding (e.g. "change this code so that...") => 4.1 (about ~10% of my use)
- I want to deeply understand one topic - I want GPT to go off for 10 minutes, look at many, many links and summarize a topic for me. (e.g. "help me understand the rise and fall of Luminar"). => Deep Research (about ~10% of my use). Note that Deep Research is not a model version to be picked from the model picker (!!!), it is a toggle inside the Tools. Under the hood it is based on o3, but I believe is not fully equivalent of just asking o3 the same query, but I am not sure.

All of this is only within the ChatGPT universe of models. In practice my use is more complicated because I like to bounce between all of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity depending on the task and out of research interest.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

"Chatting" with LLM feels like using an 80s computer terminal. The GUI hasn't been invented, yet but imo some properties of it can start to be predicted.

1 it will be visual (like GUIs of the past) because vision (pictures, charts, animations, not so much reading) is the 10-lane highway into brain. It's the highest input information bandwidth and ~1/3 of brain compute is dedicated to it.

2 it will be generative an input-conditional, i.e. the GUI is generated on-demand, specifically for your prompt, and everything is present and reconfigured with the immediate purpose in mind.

3 a little bit more of an open question - the degree of procedural. On one end of the axis you can imagine one big diffusion model dreaming up the entire output canvas. On the other, a page filled with (procedural) React components or so (think: images, charts, animations, diagrams, ...). I'd guess a mix, with the latter as the primary skeleton.

But I'm placing my bets now that some fluid, magical, ephemeral, interactive 2D canvas (GUI) written from scratch and just for you is the limit as capability goes to \infty. And I think it has already slowly started (e.g. think: code blocks / highlighting, latex blocks, markdown e.g. bold, italic, lists, tables, even emoji, and maybe more ambitiously the Artifacts tab, with Mermaid charts or fuller apps), though it's all kind of very early and primitive.

Shoutout to Iron Man in particular (and to some extent Start Trek / Minority Report) as popular science AI/UI portrayals barking up this tree.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

✨ Yesterday we had a VERY special guest at the 9th edition of the Weekly Coworking in my house

@karpathy dropped by!!!

It's an extreme honor to meet one of the greatest minds of AI. I make little AI startups, but a lot of the technology I use, he was involved and foundational in and my stuff exists because of people like him

So I made him my specialty V60 coffee with the best freshly ground 🇧🇷☕️ Brazil beans :D there was no time for 🥩 local steak but maybe next time!

Then we worked a bit, he judged the top 50 games for the #vibejam as he's part of the jury (and inventor of the word "vibe coding")

And then we walked around to show him our little surf beach town in Portugal, the weather was great and sunny so that helped

He noticed how Portugal looks oddly similar to the Bay Area, I mean Lisbon literally has the Golden Gate Bridge, it has the trams from San Francisco, and then walking in our beach town you see the cliffs and fog in the distance, exactly as you see them in California too. And the mild climate and even the color of the sunsets are super similar

Crazily enough he told me he was a Nomad List member from when it started 10 years ago, because he wanted to go digital nomad then!

What's cool about @karpathy that he seems to be in a sweet spot of being a high level engineer but with a very creative side to it. He seems very interested in seeing AI used by as many people as possible in creative ways.

And that's also kinda what he's working on next with @EurekaLabsAI building a school where AI is heavily integrated as a way to teach billions of students in the future

A very fun day and I wonder who will be the next special guest for our weekly coworking day, maybe this can become a thing

You can just start a weekly coworking in your house and people will start showing up! ☺️☺️☺️

[@levelsio @levelsio]

Confirmed judges for the Vibe Coding Game Jam 2025:
- @timsoret professional game dev
- @karpathy who started the vibe coding trend

Yeehaw! 🤠

To participate with your game go to my pinned tweet

[Alexandre Gonçalves @oAlexgonca]

We don't deserve you @karpathy
Everyone should watch this:
https://t.co/mkV4v4016c

[ℏεsam @Hesamation]

Andrej Karpathy on Tensor Cores and TF32 precision

[Alexandre Gonçalves @oAlexgonca]

@TomasCorreia9 @Chiquinho_2002 Vai vender o bilhete dele

[Alexandre Gonçalves @oAlexgonca]

@Chiquinho_2002 Vou confirmar com o meu tio e já te digo qualquer coisa