Karpathy Introduces 'Idea File' Concept — In the LLM Agent Era, the Sharable Unit Shifts From Code to Concept

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Following up on the viral LLM Knowledge Bases tweet, Karpathy published a GitHub gist on April 4 he calls an 'idea file' — a complete system prompt/architecture description designed to be copy-pasted into any LLM agent (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode) so it can build the knowledge base system for you. His explicit thesis: in the era of LLM agents, there's less point sharing specific implementations — you share the idea, then the other person's agent customizes it for their needs. This is a fundamental shift in how builders think about open source: from sharing code to sharing prompts.