Video · Nate Herk ·

I Built Another Andrej Karpathy Using Claude

In a creator video, Nate Herk explains how he built a Claude Code agent that condenses the teaching style of Andrej Karpathy, an AI expert who was a founding member of OpenAI in 2015, ran AI at Tesla for about five years leading the computer vision team behind autopilot, started Eureka Labs, and as of May is on Anthropic's pre-training team. Herk stresses the agent is not a voice clone but is built from over 700,000 words of Karpathy's blogs, lecture transcripts, GitHub repos, and X posts, and follows seven rules from his writing, such as building the smallest version first, predicting outcomes before running, showing the broken version, and never handing over code he hasn't run himself. He says the goal is to fix AI's habit of 'sounding right instead of being right' and to bring expert quality into what you build with AI, noting Karpathy publicly reported in August last year that getting Claude Code to teach him alongside code 'didn't work at all.' Herk walks through the build: crawling sources with the Python packages YouTube Transcript API and yt-dlp for YouTube and the paid twitterapi.io for X (about a dollar for every post since 2023), running one agent per source in parallel for about 45 minutes to an hour, then compiling the raw files into a wiki using Karpathy's own LLM wiki memory system idea from April, stored in a gist, producing a wiki viewable in Obsidian.

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