#productivity

Karpathy's follow-up to a viral tweet. The argument: now that agents can write the code, what you actually want to share is the idea, not the implementation. He calls it an "idea file": a short spec of what to build, nothing more. Worth thinking about for anyone who shares research tools or scripts with collaborators.

Karpathy on using LLMs to build knowledge bases from your own reading, papers, and notes instead of asking the model to recall from its training data. For niche research areas, the model just doesn't know enough. You feed it your corpus, and it becomes a reference you can actually interrogate. For fields like precision agriculture or remote sensing where survey coverage is thin, this is genuinely practical.

Affaan Mustafa's complete Claude Code setup after 10 months of daily use, covering skills, hooks, subagents, MCPs, plugins, context window management, and editor integration. Dense with practical patterns: hook examples for auto-formatting and tmux reminders, rules structure, subagent scoping, and the one rule that matters most. Keep your active MCPs under 10 or your 200k context window quietly becomes 70k.

Andrej Karpathy's reading habit: three passes through anything worth understanding. First pass is manual. Second, ask the LLM to explain and summarize. Third, Q&A on the parts that didn't land. He says he comes away with noticeably better understanding than if he'd just moved on. Works especially well for CV papers where the actual contribution is buried under five pages of related work.

Mushtaq Bilal's visual walkthrough for getting started with Zotero. Covers the browser connector, library organization, citation styles, and syncing across devices. If you're still wrestling with a .bib file by hand or copy-pasting DOIs one at a time, this is the right place to start.