Cold Mountain
Inspired by Karpathy's LLM wiki pattern, a personal knowledge base that gives me and my agents up-to-date context on the AI landscape. Automatically compiled from my Readwise saves.
Last updated Apr 27, 2026
Concepts & Patterns
Agent Proficiency — The skill of effectively managing and directing AI agents
Business Moats in AI — As AI commoditizes everything "hard to do," the only durable moats are things "hard to get"
LLM Knowledge Bases — Using LLMs to compile and maintain personal knowledge bases from raw sources
Model Quantization — Quantization reduces LLM memory footprint by storing weights as small integers instead of full-precision floats
Physical AI Systems — A set of frontier AI systems extending beyond language into the physical world
Synthetic Personas — LLMs prompted to take on personas produce average, not diverse, responses
The Future of Knowledge Work — AI is commoditizing knowledge
World Models — An alternative AI paradigm to LLMs
Tools & Frameworks
Agent Harness — The harness is everything that wraps a model to make it an agent
Agentic Engineering — The emerging discipline of designing, optimizing, and orchestrating AI agents
AI-Native Product Development — The shift from traditional PRDs and sprint planning to rapid prototyping with AI agents
Claude Code Skill Frameworks — Three major skill frameworks
Models & Safety
AI Safety & Interpretability — The effort to understand and align AI models
Claude Mythos Preview — Anthropic's most capable model as of April 2026
Frontier Models — The frontier model landscape (2026) is converging on multi-agent inference-time scaling as an alternative to ever-larger single models, while Meta's pivot from open to closed weights marks a significant shift in the open-source ecosystem.
Landscape
AGI Definitions — "AGI" is contested and often misused. On the most prominent definitions
AI Careers — The AI job market is bifurcating into "big AI" (frontier model companies pushing toward AGI) and "small AI" (fine-tuned, self-hosted models for privacy-sensitive domains)
AI Organization Design — Block (Jack Dorsey) proposes replacing corporate hierarchy with an "intelligence layer"
AI Regulation — The US is developing a fragmented patchwork of 40+ state AI laws while the Trump administration pushes for federal preemption
AI Startup Distribution — Code is commoditized
AI User Perspectives — Anthropic's 81K-person global survey (Dec 2025) found users primarily want AI for professional excellence and life management
Services-as-Software — The next trillion-dollar company will sell the work, not the tool
Venture Capital Access — Private markets are democratizing. USVC (AngelList) is the first indexed, low-fee vehicle giving retail investors access to top-tier venture capital
Vertical AI — Domain-specific AI applications are finding product-market fit faster than horizontal AI, especially in legal, healthcare, and coding
Y Combinator AI Thesis (2026) — YC's 2026 Requests for Startups reveal their bet areas
People
Andrej Karpathy — AI researcher and educator whose recent focus has shifted from model internals to knowledge management
Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic and one of the most prominent voices on both AI's transformative potential and its existential risks
DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) — Creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of 37signals. Did a public 180-turn on AI coding tools over the 2025 winter break
Peter Steinberger — Prolific builder of AI developer tools and creator of OpenClaw. Ex-PSPDFKit founder who pivoted to "polyagentmorous" development
Writing
Writing Craft — Specificity is the single most powerful lever in writing