Andrej Karpathy is an AI researcher and builder referenced here both as the source of the llm-wiki-pattern and as an early OpenAI agent researcher. In the World of Bits project, he worked with Tim Shi and Jim Fan on reinforcement-learning agents that used simplified websites through keyboard and mouse actions.source: andrej-karpathy-models-before-agents-2026.md
Karpathy’s retrospective is a model-first warning for agent builders: World of Bits did not fail because computer-use agents were inherently a bad idea, but because reinforcement learning and the available models were not ready. The productive detour was to build stronger language models; today’s agents returned with a different toolkit.source: andrej-karpathy-models-before-agents-2026.md
He also warns that agent demos and agent products are separated by years of reliability work, comparing the gap to self-driving and VR. At the same time, he treats a language model as only one part of a digital cognitive architecture, which may also need planning, reflection, memory retrieval, sensory processing, and information-routing mechanisms inspired by neuroscience. This complements harness-engineering: scaffolding can expose model capability, but cannot manufacture capability that the underlying model lacks.source: andrej-karpathy-models-before-agents-2026.md
Related pages: llm-wiki-pattern, self-improving-knowledge-base, harness-engineering, agent-loops.