karpathy-article-writing

karpathy-article-writing is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from IrtezaAsadRizvi/article-writing-skills. It costs 92 tokens per session (2,816 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing guide for producing technical articles in Andrej Karpathy’s style, using first-person explanations, hands-on work, technical detail, analogies, and honest uncertainty.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write technical tutorials, experiment reports, software reproductions, or AI-related articles in that requested style.
Why use it?
It helps shape an article around something actually built, tested, or experienced instead of producing unsupported commentary.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to write technical tutorials, experiment reports, software reproductions, or AI-related articles in that requested style.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/irtezaasadrizvi/article-writing-skills/andrej-karpathy
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 IrtezaAsadRizvi/article-writing-skills --skill andrej-karpathy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/IrtezaAsadRizvi/article-writing-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 karpathy-article-writing

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/irtezaasadrizvi/article-writing-skills/andrej-karpathy/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/irtezaasadrizvi/article-writing-skills/andrej-karpathy)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/irtezaasadrizvi/article-writing-skills/andrej-karpathy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/irtezaasadrizvi/article-writing-skills/andrej-karpathy/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 karpathy-article-writing

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/irtezaasadrizvi/article-writing-skills/andrej-karpathy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/irtezaasadrizvi/article-writing-skills/andrej-karpathy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 92 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,816 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 $0.00092 $0.02816
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.01408
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00563
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00282

Measured 12d ago against content hash 5f8a0ddd9c7e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

karpathy-article-writing 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.

andrej-karpathy/SKILL.md · 203 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 203 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Writing in Karpathy's Style

This skill distills the voice found across four reference posts:

  • A from-scratch tour of the Bitcoin protocol in Python (2021) — a dense technical tutorial
  • Short story on AI ("Forward Pass", 2021) — speculative fiction from a model's POV
  • Biohacking Lite (2020) — a year-long self-experiment written up
  • Deep Neural Nets: 33 years ago and 33 years from now (2022) — a paper reproduction + retrospective

The voice is the same across all four despite the wildly different genres. That voice is what this skill captures.


The five-word north star

Curious. Built it. Write it up.

Karpathy doesn't opine; he makes things and then reports back on what he found. If the piece isn't grounded in something the author actually did — implemented, reproduced, measured, lived through — the voice falls apart. Before writing, make sure there's a concrete artifact (code, data, a lived experiment, a reproduction) at the center.


Voice rules

First person, always

  • "I" for the author's actions, opinions, hedges: I set out to reproduce…, I suspect…, I was a bit sketched out about…
  • "We" for collaborative walkthroughs where the reader is coming along: we are going to…, we now have…
  • Avoid passive constructions. The weights were initializedI initialized the weights (or we initialize the weights).

Conversational, but never dumbed down

  • Use domain jargon without defensive scaffolding. UTXO, ECDSA, MACs, glycogen, oxidative phosphorylation — drop them in, gloss only if they're genuinely load-bearing for the next sentence.
  • The reader is assumed smart and curious. Trust them.
  • No "let me explain X in simple terms" framing. Just explain it.

Intellectual honesty via hedges

Karpathy hedges constantly, and it reads as honesty rather than weakness because the hedges are about things genuinely uncertain:

  • I suspect…
  • most likely…
  • I believe the…
  • probably…
  • as far as I can tell…
  • ¯\(ツ)

Read the full file on GitHub · 203 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 · 203 lines · 92 tokens per session scan A 5f8a0ddd9c7e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

karpathy-article-writing is a skill published in the GitHub repository IrtezaAsadRizvi/article-writing-skills (17 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 92 tokens to every session and 2,816 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.