Karpathy's One Text Note

I’m fairly minimalistic when it comes to note taking. Or so I thought, until I was schooled by Andrej Karpathy’s full-on animal mode: He uses a single note!

Any time any idea or any todo or anything else comes to mind, I append it to the note on top, simply as text.

As things get added to the top, everything else starts to sink towards the bottom almost as if under gravity. Every now and then, I fish through the notes by scrolling downwards and skimming. If I find anything that deserves to not leave my attention, I rescue it towards the top by simply copy pasting. Sometimes I merge, process, group or modify notes when they seem related. I delete a note only rarely. Notes that repeatedly don’t deserve attention will naturally continue to sink. They are never lost, they just don’t deserve the top of mind.

My note has grown quite giant over the last few years.

One text note ftw.

I love his approach. I don’t know if I’ll follow it to the letter — he has kept the same note for years, while I crave more impermanence — but I will try his append/review and gravity-as-an-organizing-principle mechanisms, perhaps periodically yeeting that file. Or let’s see, maybe I’ll keep it.

Regardless, I found the entire exposition interesting, and surprisingly, energizing! The simplicity of his note taking process is not the causation of his prodigiousness, but there certainly might be some correlation.