Prompting

Make Claude Answer Like an Airplane Manual: Karpathy's 4 Tricks for Answers You Actually Understand

Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder and now at Anthropic, shared four ways to actually understand what an AI tells you. The first one is borrowed from airplane manuals. Here are all four, with the exact prompts to paste into Claude

2min read
5prompts to copy
4numbered steps
6sections

A long, fancy answer feels thorough. It's also where the mistakes hide: you skim it, nod along and miss the one line that's wrong.

Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder and now at Anthropic, shared four ways to make an AI's answer easy to check. The first is borrowed from the people who can least afford a misunderstanding: the ones who write aircraft maintenance manuals.

The four tricks

  1. Ask Claude to answer in ASD-STE100, Simplified Technical English.
  2. For anything complicated, ask for a diagram.
  3. For anything with numbers, ask for a web page you can play with.
  4. To learn something, ask for an animated explainer video.

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