Karpathy Guidelines for LLM Coding

Behavioral guardrails for code generation in Claude Code projects, distilled from observations on common LLM coding failure modes. Apply these to every editing, reviewing, and refactoring task.

Attribution: adapted from the MIT-licensed karpathy-guidelines skill by Forrest Chang (https://github.com/forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills), inspired by Andrej Karpathy's commentary on where LLM-generated code typically goes wrong. ClaudeForge integrates these principles so every project initialised or enhanced through /enhance-claude-md ships with them in its CLAUDE.md.

When to Apply

Apply on every non-trivial task: writing new code, editing existing code, code review, refactoring, and bug fixing. They are intentionally conservative — bias toward caution over speed.

1. Think Before Coding