geohot-guidelines

geohot-guidelines is a skill for Claude Code from frankekn/george-hotz-skills. It costs 91 tokens per session (770 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Coding rules inspired by George Hotz that tell agents to prefer deletion and simple designs over extra layers, configuration, or abstractions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them for non-trivial implementation, refactoring, and code review, especially when functions gain many parameters or a change adds another abstraction.
Why use it?
They help keep refactors and new features understandable and avoid complexity that can make software fragile.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the george-hotz-skills plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit Use them for non-trivial implementation, refactoring, and code review, especially when functions gain many parameters or a change adds another abstraction.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/frankekn/george-hotz-skills/geohot-guidelines
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.

Any agent
npx skills add frankekn/george-hotz-skills --skill geohot-guidelines
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/frankekn/george-hotz-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install george-hotz-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

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.

agentmods badge for geohot-guidelines

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/frankekn/george-hotz-skills/geohot-guidelines/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/frankekn/george-hotz-skills/geohot-guidelines)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/frankekn/george-hotz-skills/geohot-guidelines"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/frankekn/george-hotz-skills/geohot-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.

agentmods 80×15 button for geohot-guidelines

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/frankekn/george-hotz-skills/geohot-guidelines"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/frankekn/george-hotz-skills/geohot-guidelines.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 91 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 770 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00091 $0.00770
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00385
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00154
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00077

Measured 12d ago against content hash f89831b70271, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

geohot-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 12d 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.

skills/geohot-guidelines/SKILL.md · 39 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 39 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

geohot guidelines — radical simplicity

Distilled from George Hotz's public philosophy. The reflex these rules install: the enemy is complexity, and the move is almost always to remove, not add. Use on any non-trivial implementation, refactor, or review — not on one-liners.

"You can always make your software do more. The magic is when you can make your software do more without adding complexity — because complex things eventually collapse under their own weight."

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 abstraction, configurability, or future-proofing unless asked.
  • Smell: introducing a new manager/handler/factory/adapter to do one thing → stop, ask what to remove instead.

2. You have never refactored enough

"Your code can get smaller, your code can get simpler, your ideas can be more elegant." tinygrad aims to express ML with roughly 25 low-level ops, compared with roughly 250 in XLA / PrimTorch.

  • Delete-first: before touching a subsystem, ask "can this not exist?" Collapse duplicated logic to one source of truth and delete the glue that kept the copies in sync. The best change is often a negative diff. LOC is debt, not output.
  • Fence: prove it's truly dead first (read the callsites); scope deletion to what the task touches, not adjacent code; never delete a real invariant (money, auth, data-integrity, lifecycle) to "simplify" — that's a bug.

3. Wide interfaces mean your abstraction is wrong

  • A wide interface is a design signal. If a function is growing toward five arguments, treat the boundary as suspect. Fix the boundary (split the responsibility, or pass one well-shaped value) — don't hide the width behind an options/kwargs bag.

4. Understand the whole stack — nothing is magic

tinygrad as "the RISC of the ML stack — extreme simplicity that allows anyone to understand it."

  • Build the smallest runnable unit, print/inspect its real inputs and outputs, and check them against expectation before stacking more on top. The machine is not magic — look at the actual value; don't reason about what it "should" be.
  • Read the definition + the callsites before concluding. Don't assert 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 · 39 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. 12d ago First seen · 39 lines · 91 tokens per session scan A f89831b70271

Subscribe to this mod's changes

geohot-guidelines is a skill published in the GitHub repository frankekn/george-hotz-skills (12 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 91 tokens to every session and 770 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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