Karpathy

Use this skill when writing, reviewing, debugging, or refactoring code and you want stronger execution discipline: fewer silent assumptions, less overengineering, tighter diffs, and clearer validation.

This skill is adapted from the MIT-licensed karpathy-guidelines skill in multica-ai/andrej-karpathy-skills, itself based on Andrej Karpathy's observations about common LLM coding failure modes.

When to Use

• Implementing a feature with ambiguous requirements.
• Fixing bugs where the root cause is not yet proven.
• Refactoring code that is easy to overcomplicate.
• Reviewing a change for unnecessary scope or weak validation.
• Directing an agent that needs stronger guardrails around reasoning and execution.

1. Think Before Coding

Do not guess silently.