Every research organization is described by its program.md — and once that's code, you can meta-optimize the program.md itself, creating recursive self-improvement.

Karpathy describes how research organizations can be encoded as program.md files, allowing meta-optimization of the organizational structure itself, creating layers of recursive improvement. ✦ AI generated

Andrej Karpathy · No Priors · 2026-03-20 · original ↗

You can imagine that different program.mds would give you different progress. So basically every research organization is described by program MD. A research organization is a set of markdown files that describe all the roles and how the whole thing connects. And you can imagine having a better research organization. So maybe they do fewer standups in the morning because they're useless. And this is all just code, right? And so you can, so one organization can have fewer standups, one organization can have more. One organization can be very risk-taking. One organization can be less. As you can definitely imagine that you have multiple research orgs, and then they all have code. And once you have code, then you can imagine tuning the code. So 100%, there's like the meta layer of it.

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