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Design like Karpathy is watching — Zeke Sikelianos, Replicate
Takeaway
Your docs' primary audience is now an LLM — ship llms.txt, curl snippets, and an MCP server, not pretty branded pages.
Summary
- Zeke Sikelianos (Replicate) uses Andrej Karpathy's MenuGen build experience as a case study for redesigning developer products for LLM consumption.
- Karpathy's blog roasted Replicate (along with Vercel, OpenAI) for outdated docs in LLM training data, outdated docs on the site, API changes, and rate limits hard on new paid accounts.
- Replicate's responses: adopt llms.txt — plain-markdown docs versions, plus copy-as-markdown / 'open in Claude' / 'open in ChatGPT' buttons on every model page.
- Embrace curl: Karpathy's line 'LLMs don't click, they curl' — single curl snippets cover HTTP method, JSON payload, auth, async — exactly the artifact LLMs ingest cleanly.
- Built an MCP server for Replicate by converting their OpenAPI schema; install via a small JSON snippet and Claude Desktop gets full API access — and packaged Cog's docs as a single llms.txt for cog.run.
developer-experiencellms-txtmcp
Original description
Legendary AI engineer and educator Andrej Karpathy recently blogged about his experiences building, deploying, and monetizing a vibe-coded web app called MenuGen. Let's dig into the challenges he faced and learn what we as AI designers can do to make life better for the Andrejs of the world. About Zeke Sikelianos Zeke's been building developer tools at companies like Heroku, npm, GitHub, and Replicate for over ten years. He cares deeply about simple and tasteful developer experiences, and thinks the world of generative AI deserves small, sharp, and composable tools! Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter