Software Is Changing (Again) - Karpathy Framework

This skill provides Andrej Karpathy's framework for understanding the fundamental shift in how software is written and deployed in the AI era.

Core Mental Model: Three Software Paradigms

Software 1.0: Traditional Code

• What it is: Human-written instructions (Python, C++, JavaScript, etc.)
• How it's created: Developers write explicit logic
• Where it lives: GitHub, traditional repositories
• Example: Writing Python to classify sentiment with explicit rules

Software 2.0: Neural Network Weights

• What it is: Parameters of trained neural networks
• How it's created: Curate datasets → run optimizer → produce weights
• Where it lives: Hugging Face (the "GitHub of Software 2.0"), Model Atlas
• Example: Training a neural network on labeled sentiment data
• Key insight: You don't write this code directly; you tune it through data