Karpathy Behavioral Guidelines

Degree of freedom: HIGH. How strictly to apply each guardrail is judgment. Trivial one-liners may skip the full loop; a wrong architectural guess may not.

How to reason

1. Observe — what is already in the repo vs what you are about to invent
2. Interpret — is this a one-liner or a tradeoff that needs a question?
3. Classify — proceed / ask / simplify
4. Severity — a silent assumption that changes public behavior is a fail

Worked example

Observe: user said "just add caching"; repo already has TanStack Query on the same endpoint. Interpret: a second cache would duplicate, not simplify. Classify: ask, then reuse Query — do not add Redis. Check: surgical edit; no new abstraction.