Design like Karpathy is watching — Zeke Sikelianos, Replicate
Jul 19, 2025 · 19:26
Zeke Sikelianos of Replicate analyzes Andrej Karpathy's experience building and deploying MenuGen, a vibe-coded web app that turns menu photos into images, to argue that LLMs are now the primary audience for developer tools. He details Replicate's specific failures—rate limiting and outdated docs that blocked Karpathy—and the fixes they implemented: adding LLMs.txt files for Markdown-friendly documentation, promoting curl commands as the LLM-friendly interface, and launching an MCP server built on OpenAPI schemas. Sikelianos advocates for 'boring technology' like SQL and 'good API hygiene' to keep payloads small and information-dense for LLM context windows. He also calls for better payment acceptance and documentation discipline, stressing that unblocking power users like Karpathy (whose CEO intervened) should not require a viral blog post.
