---
title: "Andrej Karpathy"
description: "AI researcher, educator, Stanford CS231n co-creator, and developer of the build-from-scratch pedagogy."
section: "entities"
type: "entity"
created: "2026-08-22"
updated: "2026-08-24"
confidence: "high"
tags: ["person", "educator", "agents", "pedagogy"]
canonical: "https://pyweb.dev/wiki/andrej-karpathy"
---
# Andrej Karpathy

AI researcher and educator: Stanford CS231n co-creator, ex-Tesla AI director, OpenAI
founding member, builder of micrograd/nanoGPT and the "Zero to Hero" series.

## Core contributions to AI engineering
- [karpathy four guidelines](/wiki/karpathy-four-guidelines): think before coding, simplicity first, surgical changes,
  goal-driven execution — distilled from his observations of LLM coding pitfalls.
- [build from scratch pedagogy](/wiki/build-from-scratch-pedagogy): micrograd before PyTorch, nanoGPT before the library.
  The toy implementation IS the explanation — an explicit descendant of Feynman's
  "What I cannot create, I do not understand".
- [llm wiki pattern](/wiki/llm-wiki-pattern): compile knowledge once into interlinked markdown, keep it current,
  instead of rediscovering per query (the foundational pattern for agent knowledge bases).
- Autoresearch: agent loops that run experiments against measurable objectives, an approach
  applied to software optimization in [conformance suites as fitness functions](/wiki/conformance-suites-as-fitness-functions).
- Code as prose: readable, linear, minimal indirection; optimize for the reader —
  human or agent.

## Relationship to Engineering Methodology
Explicit [richard feynman](/wiki/richard-feynman) disciple in method. His guidelines operationalize
[matt pocock](/wiki/matt-pocock)'s "make codebases agents love" at the single-change level (per aihero.dev: "design
codebases agents love"): the flows structure WHEN to code, while the guidelines govern HOW to touch each file safely.

---

## Agent Navigation

cluster: person (170 pages) | betweenness: 174.3

### References (outbound)
- [Karpathy's Four Guidelines](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/karpathy-four-guidelines.md)
- [Build-From-Scratch Pedagogy](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/build-from-scratch-pedagogy.md)
- [LLM Wiki Pattern](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/llm-wiki-pattern.md)
- [Conformance Suites as Fitness Functions](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/conformance-suites-as-fitness-functions.md)
- [Richard Feynman](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/richard-feynman.md)
- [Matt Pocock](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/matt-pocock.md)

### Referenced by (inbound)
- [Build-From-Scratch Pedagogy](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/build-from-scratch-pedagogy.md)
- [Context Engineering](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/context-engineering.md)
- [Karpathy's Four Guidelines](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/karpathy-four-guidelines.md)
- [LLM Wiki Pattern](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/llm-wiki-pattern.md)
- [Andrew Ng](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/andrew-ng.md)
- [Agentic Engineering Entity Accounting](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/agentic-engineering-entity-accounting.md)
- [LLM Wiki Ecosystem: Spec vs. Implementations](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/llm-wiki-ecosystem-analysis.md)

### Evidence (verified primary sources)
- [karpathy-guidelines-skill-2026](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/raw/articles/karpathy-guidelines-skill-2026.md) | origin: https://github.com/multica-ai/andrej-karpathy-skills/blob/main/skills/karpathy-guidelines/SKILL.md | ingested: 2026-08-22 | sha256: 3dbba31cbdb82e77622b5e9f337405d3b934498957fe88f021500746844073f4
- [agentic-engineering-trends-2026-synthesis](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/raw/articles/agentic-engineering-trends-2026-synthesis.md) | origin: https://pyweb.dev/wiki/raw/articles/agentic-engineering-trends-2026-synthesis | ingested: 2026-08-24 | sha256: 6c78ca873a4df069f1606e9f68538de7b428633720e48e184fad0ea31b5d2a25

### Machine endpoints
- Knowledge graph: https://pyweb.dev/api/graph.json
- Graph analysis: https://pyweb.dev/api/graph-analysis.json
- Context index: https://pyweb.dev/llms.txt