New categories in the articles don't have a dedicated category page

[esh-g]

The /category/* pages are limited and pre-generated, while the articles have certain categories like llm, pretraining, career, etc, that don't have dedicated /category/ pages.
This leads to a 404 error showing up when clicking on the category.

Screen.Recording.2026-06-16.at.3.06.16.PM.mov

[esh-g]

There are many ways to fix this issue. I would like to raise a PR and contribute if possible.

Here are the alternatives we can take:

1. Stick to the classic GitHub Pages build

The github pages hosting uses safe-mode by default so it cannot allow plugins like jekyll-archives to create category files before deploying. Therefore we must use a custom python or bash script.

We can set the script to scan your _posts folder, grab all unique categories, and automatically stub out the missing .md files in your category/ directory. You just run it locally right before you commit. It adds one step to your workflow, but it’s completely bulletproof and keeps GitHub Pages happy.

2. Bypass safe mode with GitHub Actions

GitHub allows to override their default safe-mode builder by using GitHub Actions to build the site.
If we set up a basic Jekyll GitHub Actions workflow, the build happens in its own isolated runner rather than GitHub's restricted environment. This disables safe mode entirely, meaning we can use plugins like jekyll-archives or just create one from scratch.

I would recommend going with option 1, as it does not touch your hosting settings. And since there is already a mdconvert.sh script, we can probably do something like having a common script that does the conversion as well as category creation.
Let me know what you think, and I would be happy to raise a PR!

Thanks

[vlad17]

(1) is fine and safe and can be automated with pre-commit hooks for the repo. thanks for filing an issue, and happy to accept a pr

[esh-g]

@vlad17 Created the PR here: #35

P. S. Really appreciate you posting the article on the roadmap to land a job at frontier AI lab. I am 18 years old currently and have worked on just front-end javascript, react, react-native work for clients on upwork till now, but as I am joining university, I want to focus on creating a skill set for AI, Quant research and am following Andrej Karpathy, Reiner Pope and yourself. I am currently working on my C++ skills with some DSA before university starts, to learn CUDA. I will be sure to develop my skill set this year and be back with an email with the path you mentioned in the article.

Also thanks for letting me contribute!