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A free guide by Mariah Brunner ↗ INSTAGRAM ↗ TIKTOK

Watch The Best
Use AI. Then
Copy Them.

The fastest way to stop seeing AI as magic is to watch a great person just use it. Here’s the watchlist I promised, with what to steal from each video and a prompt that turns watching into doing.

Andrej Karpathy was a founding member of OpenAI and led AI at Tesla. He’s one of the most respected AI researchers in the world. In How I use LLMs, he shares his screen and talks to AI the way he does every day. It’s an ordinary workday on camera, with the same apps you can use.

He posted it in February 2025, so some of the apps and models on screen have changed. Watch it for the part that hasn’t aged: how a great practitioner talks to AI. Plain questions, quick experiments, zero fear of asking something "dumb." By the end you can see there’s no trick to it.

Video 1: How I Use LLMs

It’s 2 hours 11 minutes and it’s chaptered, so treat it like a buffet.

  1. If you only have 20 minutes: watch the opening sections on how he picks which model to use and how he phrases everyday questions.
  2. Slow down for the parts where he works with his own files and data and has the AI run code to analyze them. The voice and image workflows in the second half are worth it too, because most people never touch them.
  3. Steal this: notice how short his prompts are. He asks, looks at the answer and asks again. The skill is the back-and-forth, not the opening prompt.
  4. Skip: the details of specific model versions and app screens. Those have moved on. His habits haven’t.

Why this works on your brain

In college I thought founders were a different breed. Then I worked with them at Meta and saw they weren’t. Watching Karpathy work does the same thing for AI. Seeing greatness up close shrinks it to learnable size.

The Rest Of The Watchlist

02

Karpathy: Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT

The companion video, about 3.5 hours. Video 1 shows the practice. This one builds the mental model of what happens when the AI answers. It also explains why it hallucinates and why it’s great at some things and weirdly bad at others.

Watch the deep dive →

03

Karpathy: Intro to Large Language Models

The one-hour foundation, from November 2023. Send it to anyone in your life who needs the basics first, or start here yourself if the deep dive feels heavy. The ideas hold up even though the examples are older.

Watch the 1-hour intro →

04

How Boris Uses Claude Code

Boris Cherny created Claude Code at Anthropic. This fan-made site, which isn’t affiliated with Anthropic, collects the workflow tips he’s shared publicly, from running several sessions at once to having one agent check another agent’s work. Karpathy demystifies talking to AI. This demystifies putting AI to work.

Read Boris’s tips →

Newer to AI? Watch 3, then 1, then 4, then 2. Already use AI daily? Watch 1, then 4, and save 2 for a weekend.

Turn Watching Into Skill

Passive watching fades in a week. Twenty minutes of copying what you watched makes it stick. Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT right after any video on the list.

Watch-Along Practice Prompt
You're my AI practice coach. I just watched a video of an expert using AI, and I want to turn what I saw into my own skill today, using my real work instead of toy examples. WHAT I WATCHED [Name the video and the part. Example: "Karpathy's How I Use LLMs, the sections on file uploads and data analysis."] THE 3 TECHNIQUES THAT STOOD OUT TO ME 1. [Describe it in your own words, even roughly. Example: "He asks short questions and iterates instead of writing one big prompt."] 2. [Second technique] 3. [Third technique] MY ACTUAL WORK [2 or 3 sentences on what you do all day. Example: "I manage social media for a dental clinic: content calendars, replying to reviews, monthly reports."] NOW DO THIS: 1. For each technique, design one practice rep I can do in under 10 minutes using my real work as the material. 2. For each rep, write out the exact first message I should send you, so I can start immediately. 3. Run rep 1 with me right now. Coach me as we go: if my follow-up messages are weaker than the technique I'm copying, tell me what the expert would have asked instead. 4. At the end, tell me which ONE technique gave me the most leverage for my job, and what tomorrow's 10-minute rep should be. Rules: if I describe a technique wrong, gently correct me before we practice it. If a rep would need a tool or feature you don't have, say so and give me the closest version you can do. Keep each coaching note to 2 sentences.

The belief part

Steve Jobs said everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you. Watch one of these this week, run the prompt after, and you’ll have proof from your own hands. You’re a thousand percent capable of this.