Karpathy’s Prompting Hack: Ramble at Your AI for 10 Minutes

Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and now a member of Anthropic’s pre-training team, shared a new prompting technique he calls "long-form dictation prompts." When faced with a complex task, he opens voice input and talks continuously for about 10 minutes. The content can be jumpy and messy — no need to organize it into a neat instruction first.

Karpathy argues that large language models are surprisingly good at reconstructing the real goal from these fragments. The model can also help untangle his own messy thinking. Sometimes he’ll let the model ask follow-up questions, turning the monologue into a mini interview. The payoff? Getting the context out early means fewer corrections later.