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Andrej Karpathy

Summary

AI researcher, co-founder of OpenAI, former Director of AI at Tesla. Proposed the LLM Wiki pattern (April 2026) and coined the term "vibe coding" (early 2025).

Key Contributions

LLM Wiki Pattern (April 2026)

Introduced the concept of a persistent, LLM-maintained wiki as an alternative to stateless RAG retrieval. The pattern reframes knowledge systems from "retrieve on every query" to "compile once, query against compiled knowledge."

His own wiki reached approximately 100 articles and ~500,000 words while remaining navigable by the LLM using index and summaries — faster and more accurate than a RAG pipeline for his research use case.

Notable quote: "I'm spending more of my tokens with my agents manipulating knowledge like Markdown and Obsidian instead of manipulating code."

Vibe Coding (Early 2025)

Coined the term: "There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding', where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works."

This framing kicked off a cultural and technical movement — and a debate about whether AI-assisted coding is liberation or a trap.

Background

  • Co-founder of OpenAI
  • Former Director of AI at Tesla (led Autopilot's neural network stack)
  • Known for teaching deep learning through widely-viewed lectures
  • Published a GitHub Gist describing the LLM Wiki pattern that went viral among developers within days
  • Gist link: github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94f