george-hotz-skills: Instructions file for Claude Code

CLAUDE.md

george-hotz-skills CLAUDE.md is an instructions file for Claude Code from frankekn/george-hotz-skills. It costs 507 tokens per session, scanned A, a copy of george-hotz-skills AGENTS.md, MIT.

Coding guidelines based on George Hotz's public ideas about keeping software simple. They favor deleting unnecessary code, using narrow interfaces, and understanding how the whole system works.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them when designing, reviewing, refactoring, or debugging software, especially when deciding whether a new layer or abstraction is actually needed.
Why use it?
They help prevent needless layers, abstractions, and configuration that make code harder to understand and maintain.

Instructions file for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: the file is CLAUDE.md. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md.

This is frankekn/george-hotz-skills's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on george-hotz-skills itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything george-hotz-skills configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to frankekn/george-hotz-skills. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/frankekn/george-hotz-skills/main/CLAUDE.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/frankekn/george-hotz-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

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Per session 507 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 507 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin 98% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00507 $0.00507
Opus 5 $0.00253 $0.00253
Sonnet 5 $0.00101 $0.00101
Haiku 4.5 $0.00051 $0.00051

Measured 11d ago against content hash b2ba12101596, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

george-hotz-skills CLAUDE.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

98% identical to george-hotz-skills AGENTS.md — 2 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

CLAUDE.md · 42 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 42 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

CLAUDE.md

Radical-simplicity coding guidelines distilled from George Hotz's public philosophy. The reflex: complexity is the enemy — remove before you add. Merge with project-specific instructions as needed.

Tradeoff: these bias toward deletion and narrow interfaces over speed and extensibility. For trivial tasks, use judgment. Never delete a real invariant (money, auth, data-integrity, lifecycle) to "simplify" — that's a bug, not a cleanup.

1. Complexity is the enemy

More capability at equal or lower complexity is the only real win. Adding a feature by adding a layer is a loss.

  • Solve the actual request with the least machinery that works.
  • No speculative abstractions, configurability, or future-proofing nobody asked for.
  • Smell: a new manager/handler/factory/adapter to do one thing → stop, ask what to remove instead.

2. You have never refactored enough

Line count is a number you drive down. The best change is often a negative diff.

  • Delete-first: before touching a subsystem, ask "can this not exist?"
  • Collapse duplicated logic to one source of truth; delete the glue that synced the copies.
  • Prove something is dead before deleting it (check the callers). LOC is debt, not output.

3. Wide interfaces mean your abstraction is wrong

A wide interface is a design signal, not a styling nit.

  • When an interface grows wide, especially toward five arguments, fix the boundary — split the responsibility, or pass one well-shaped value.
  • Don't paper over it with an options/**kwargs bag so the count "looks" smaller.

4. Understand the whole stack — nothing is magic

Don't reason about what code "should" do — look at what it does.

  • Build the smallest runnable unit, print/inspect its real inputs and outputs, check against expectation, then stack more on top.
  • Read the definition and the callsites before concluding.
  • Don't declare code "works" or "is safe" without seeing it; don't cargo-cult a pattern you don't understand.
  • AI-generated code must be read and validated line by line; speed is not correctness.

Read the full file on GitHub · 42 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 42 lines · 507 tokens per session scan A b2ba12101596

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george-hotz-skills CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository frankekn/george-hotz-skills (12 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 507 tokens to every session, about $0.0025 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 98% identical to george-hotz-skills AGENTS.md, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.

Related

Other instructions, from other repositories