karpathy-guidelines

karpathy-guidelines is a skill for Claude Code from strikersam/autonomous-ai-agency. It costs 25 tokens per session (700 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of coding guidelines for AI agents focused on simple, correct, well-tested changes and explicit assumptions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Guiding agents while they write or review code, especially when interpreting issues and deciding how much to change.
Why use it?
It reduces overcomplicated solutions, unrequested refactoring, hidden uncertainty, and claims that work is finished without verification.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/.

Good fit Guiding agents while they write or review code, especially when interpreting issues and deciding how much to change.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/strikersam/autonomous-ai-agency/karpathy-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 strikersam/autonomous-ai-agency --skill karpathy-guidelines
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/strikersam/autonomous-ai-agency

Made for: Claude Code.

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-guidelines

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/strikersam/autonomous-ai-agency/karpathy-guidelines/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/strikersam/autonomous-ai-agency/karpathy-guidelines)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/strikersam/autonomous-ai-agency/karpathy-guidelines"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/strikersam/autonomous-ai-agency/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for karpathy-guidelines

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/strikersam/autonomous-ai-agency/karpathy-guidelines"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/strikersam/autonomous-ai-agency/karpathy-guidelines.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 25 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 700 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 $0.00025 $0.00700
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00350
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00140
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00070

Measured 9d ago against content hash 5ee8006db469, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, 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 9d 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.

.claude/skills/karpathy-guidelines/SKILL.md · 55 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 55 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Karpathy Guidelines Skill

Inspired by: andrej-karpathy-skills — behavioral guidelines derived from Andrej Karpathy's observations on common LLM coding pitfalls (MIT licensed).

Purpose: Reduce the failure modes this agency's coding agents hit most: overcomplication, silent assumptions, drive-by refactors, and unverifiable "done" claims. Applies to every agent that writes or reviews code — the internal agent loop, the issue-to-PR workflows, and external harnesses driven via ECC.

Tradeoff: These rules bias toward caution over speed. For trivial one-line changes, use judgment.

1. Think Before Coding

Don't assume. Don't hide confusion. Surface tradeoffs.

  • State assumptions explicitly in the task result. If uncertain, pause the task and surface a question through the HITL gate instead of guessing.
  • If multiple interpretations of an issue exist, list them in the PR body — don't pick silently.
  • If a simpler approach exists than what the issue requests, say so and propose it.

2. Simplicity First

Minimum code that solves the problem. Nothing speculative.

  • No features beyond what the issue or directive asked for.
  • No abstractions for single-use code. No unrequested "configurability".
  • No error handling for impossible scenarios.
  • Self-check before opening the PR: "Would a senior engineer call this overcomplicated?" If yes, rewrite smaller.

3. Surgical Changes

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

  • Don't "improve" adjacent code, comments, or formatting — this repo's diffs are reviewed by council-review; unrelated churn wastes review cycles and inflates risk scores.
  • Match existing style even when you'd choose differently.
  • Remove imports/variables your change orphaned. Leave pre-existing dead code alone; mention it in the PR body instead.
  • The test: every changed line must trace directly to the issue being implemented.

4. Goal-Driven Execution

Define success criteria. Loop until verified.

Read the full file on GitHub · 55 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. 9d ago First seen · 55 lines · 25 tokens per session scan A 5ee8006db469

Subscribe to this mod's changes

karpathy-guidelines is a skill published in the GitHub repository strikersam/autonomous-ai-agency (8 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 700 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-09-03.