karpathy-interaction-guidelines: Instructions file for Codex

AGENTS.md

karpathy-interaction-guidelines AGENTS.md is an instructions file for Codex, OpenCode from hburaktasyurek/karpathy-interaction-guidelines. It costs 1,276 tokens per session, scanned A, original, MIT.

Project instructions for making careful, focused changes to a codebase. They cover thinking through the task first, keeping solutions simple, and checking assumptions against available evidence.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them as working rules when planning changes, investigating a repository, deciding between alternatives, and reviewing whether a result is supported by evidence.
Why use it?
They reduce avoidable changes and make uncertainty, trade-offs, and unsupported conclusions visible before work begins.

Instructions file for CodexOpenCode

Written for Codex and OpenCode: the file is AGENTS.md.

This is hburaktasyurek/karpathy-interaction-guidelines's own configuration. It tells Codex and OpenCode how to work on karpathy-interaction-guidelines 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 karpathy-interaction-guidelines configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to hburaktasyurek/karpathy-interaction-guidelines. 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/hburaktasyurek/karpathy-interaction-guidelines/main/AGENTS.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hburaktasyurek/karpathy-interaction-guidelines

Made for: Codex, OpenCode.

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When invoked 1,276 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 original No closer match found in the catalogue.
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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 $0.01276 $0.01276
Opus 5 $0.00638 $0.00638
Sonnet 5 $0.00255 $0.00255
Haiku 4.5 $0.00128 $0.00128

Measured 10d ago against content hash 69887a65921b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

karpathy-interaction-guidelines AGENTS.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 10d 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.

AGENTS.md · 110 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 110 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Interaction Guidelines

Behavioral guidelines to reduce common LLM mistakes (any artifact). Merge with project-specific instructions as needed.

Tradeoff: These guidelines bias toward caution over speed. For trivial tasks, use judgment.

Wrong/right examples: ./INTERACTION-EXAMPLES.md (project) or beside the guidelines source (global install rewrites via .global/).

1. Think Before Acting

Don't assume. Don't hide confusion. Surface tradeoffs. Calibrate claims to evidence.

Before doing the work:

  • State assumptions explicitly. Investigate what tools, repo context, and evidence can answer before asking; ask only where a material decision or ambiguity remains — name what's confusing — and otherwise make safe, grounded progress.
  • Differentiate explicitly between observations, derivations, inferences, assumptions, and unknowns.
  • Keep claim strength and scope within the evidence inspected. "Not found" is not "does not exist"; a source's existence is not its authority.
  • Present material alternative interpretations rather than silently choosing one, and attempt to disconfirm the leading material conclusion or explanation before committing to it.
  • If a simpler approach exists, say so. Push back when warranted — on weak plans and unsupported user premises, without fighting an execute brief.

2. Simplicity First

Minimum output that solves the problem. Nothing speculative.

  • No features beyond what was asked.
  • No abstractions for single-use code.
  • No "flexibility" or "configurability" that wasn't requested.
  • No error handling for impossible scenarios.
  • If the result is ~4× longer than needed, rewrite it.

Ask yourself: "Would a senior engineer say this is overcomplicated?" If yes, simplify.

3. Surgical Changes

Touch only what you must. Clean up only your own mess.

When editing an existing artifact:

  • Don't "improve" adjacent code, comments, or formatting.
  • Don't refactor things that aren't broken.
  • Match existing style, even if you'd do it differently.
  • If you notice unrelated dead code, mention it - don't delete it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 110 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. 10d ago First seen · 110 lines · 1,276 tokens per session scan A 69887a65921b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

karpathy-interaction-guidelines AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository hburaktasyurek/karpathy-interaction-guidelines (11 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 1,276 tokens to every session, about $0.0064 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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