What is Karpathy Guidelines?

A set of coding rules based on guidance from Andrej Karpathy. It tells the coding agent to think before editing, keep implementations small, make focused changes, and work toward a clear goal.

Use it to guide planning, implementation, and focused code edits.

It reduces unnecessary changes and common mistakes when an agent modifies code.

Karpathy Guidelines — Cursor rule for Cursor by BambooGap

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/BambooGap/skills-orchestrator

Made for: Cursor.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/bamboogap/skills-orchestrator/karpathy-guidelines/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/rules/bamboogap/skills-orchestrator/karpathy-guidelines)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/bamboogap/skills-orchestrator/karpathy-guidelines"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/bamboogap/skills-orchestrator/karpathy-guidelines/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/bamboogap/skills-orchestrator/karpathy-guidelines"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/bamboogap/skills-orchestrator/karpathy-guidelines.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.

When invoked 124 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

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.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00000	$0.00124
Opus 5.5	$0.00000	$0.00050
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00000	$0.00025
Haiku 4.5	$0.00000	$0.00012

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 3e273916e0ae, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Karpathy Guidelines 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 2mo 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.

.cursor/rules/karpathy-guidelines.mdc · 13 lines

What it actually says