Adapting the Karpathy Loop for Production System-Prompt Optimization

In early 2025, Andrej Karpathy described a simple but powerful pattern for autonomous software improvement he called "autoresearch." The core idea: give an LLM agent a frozen evaluation harness, a bounded editable artifact, a natural-language specification of what "better" means, and a ratchet that commits on improvement and reverts on regression. Run it overnight. Collect improvements.