From Karpathy's micrograd to smoltorch: Understanding Autograd from First Principles

Nov 18, 2025 · 7 min read · Why I Built My Own Deep Learning Framework? After watching Andrej Karpathy’s micrograd lecture, I had a realization: I’d been using PyTorch for months, but I didn’t really understand how autograd worked. Sure, I could call .backward() and get gradien...