Watch The Best Use AI. Then Copy Them. ⚡
The fastest way to stop seeing AI as magic is to watch a genuinely great person just... use it. This is the watchlist Somya promised: Karpathy's everyday-AI.
⚡ TL;DR
- Sources: The X post going around right now → · Watch: Karpathy, How I Use LLMs → Andrej Karpathy was a founding member of OpenAI and ran AI at Tesla.
- He's one of the best AI researchers alive.
- And in this video, he does something almost nobody at his level does: he just shows his screen and talks to AI the way he does every day.
- No hype, no launch, no secret tools.
- Don't watch it to learn the latest features (it's over a year old now, and some tools have moved on).
Sources: The X post going around right now → · Watch: Karpathy, How I Use LLMs →
Andrej Karpathy was a founding member of OpenAI and ran AI at Tesla. He's one of the best AI researchers alive. And in this video, he does something almost nobody at his level does: he just shows his screen and talks to AI the way he does every day. No hype, no launch, no secret tools.
Don't watch it to learn the latest features (it's over a year old now, and some tools have moved on). Watch it for the one skill that hasn't aged a day: how a great practitioner talks to AI. Plain questions. Quick experiments. Zero fear of asking something "dumb." By the end you stop thinking "I could never do that" because you can see, on screen, that there's no trick to it.
Karpathy: How I Use LLMs (The Main Event)
It's 2 hours 11 minutes, and you don't need to watch it in one sitting. It's chaptered, so treat it like a buffet:
If you only have 20 minutes: watch the opening sections on how he picks which model to use and how he phrases everyday questions. That alone changes how you talk to AI.
The sections worth slowing down for: using AI with your own files and data, having it run code and analyze things for you, and the voice and image workflows most people never touch.
What to steal: notice how SHORT his prompts are. He doesn't write essays. He asks, looks at the answer, and asks again. The skill is the back-and-forth, not the opening prompt.
What to skip: anything about specific model versions. The models he demos have been replaced twice over. The behavior hasn't.
Why this works on your brain
Somya's point in the video is the real lesson: in college she thought founders were a different breed, until she worked with them at Meta and saw they weren't. Watching Karpathy work is the same exposure therapy for AI. Seeing greatness up close shrinks it to learnable size.
The Rest Of The Watchlist
2. Karpathy: Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT → The companion video. Where "How I Use LLMs" shows the practice, this one builds the mental model: what's actually happening when the AI answers, why it hallucinates, why it's great at some things and weirdly bad at others. Watch it when you're ready to understand the machine instead of just driving it.
3. Karpathy: Intro to Large Language Models → The one-hour version for the person in your life who needs the foundation first (or for you, if the deep dive feels heavy). It's the most-recommended LLM explainer on the internet for a reason.
4. Autonomous CLI & Agentic Loops Masterclass → See how top AI systems engineers structure loops, automations, and sub-agents reviewed by other agents. If conversational AI teaches you to ask questions, production agentic engineering teaches you how to automate end-to-end execution.
Watch order if you're newer: 3, then 1, then 4, then 2. Watch order if you already use AI daily: 1, then 4, and keep 2 for a weekend.
Turn Watching Into Skill
Passive watching fades in a week. Twenty minutes of copying what you watched makes it permanent. This prompt is the bridge.
Copy this prompt into Claude right after you finish any video on the watchlist. It turns the 3 techniques you just saw into personalized practice reps on YOUR actual work, so the video becomes a skill instead of entertainment.
The belief part
Steve Jobs said everything around you was built by people no smarter than you. Watch one of these videos this week, run the practice prompt after, and you'll have proof from your own hands. You're a thousand percent capable of this.