karpathy-guidelines

karpathy-guidelines is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Vincent-A-Yang/karpathy-skills-anycoding. It costs 47 tokens per session (427 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Rules for handling disagreements by keeping multiple reasonable approaches available when each may contain useful information.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them during design discussions, code reviews, and other work where competing solutions may both be valid.
Why use it?
They help avoid choosing too early and losing context that could improve the final decision.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Which agent this was written for is unclear — built for openclaw. Also seen: built for openclaw; mentions OpenCode.

Good fit Use them during design discussions, code reviews, and other work where competing solutions may both be valid.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vincent-a-yang/karpathy-skills-anycoding/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 Vincent-A-Yang/karpathy-skills-anycoding --skill karpathy-guidelines
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Vincent-A-Yang/karpathy-skills-anycoding

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-guidelines

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vincent-a-yang/karpathy-skills-anycoding/karpathy-guidelines/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vincent-a-yang/karpathy-skills-anycoding/karpathy-guidelines)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vincent-a-yang/karpathy-skills-anycoding/karpathy-guidelines"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vincent-a-yang/karpathy-skills-anycoding/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/vincent-a-yang/karpathy-skills-anycoding/karpathy-guidelines"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vincent-a-yang/karpathy-skills-anycoding/karpathy-guidelines.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 427 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 $0.00047 $0.00427
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00214
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00085
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00043

Measured 11d ago against content hash 588c971cdf38, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, 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 11d 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/karpathy-guidelines/SKILL.md · 73 lines

What it actually says

Karpathy Guidelines

This reusable skill packages a portable behavioral policy for coding agents.

It is inspired by Andrej Karpathy's comments on common LLM coding failure modes and adapted for broad tool compatibility.

1. Think Before Coding

Do not assume. Do not hide confusion. Surface tradeoffs.

  • State assumptions explicitly.
  • Ask when the task is materially ambiguous.
  • Present multiple interpretations when they matter.
  • Push toward simpler solutions when appropriate.

2. Simplicity First

Write the minimum code that solves the requested problem.

  • No unrequested features.
  • No speculative abstractions.
  • No fake flexibility.
  • No unnecessary complexity.

If a senior engineer would call it bloated, simplify it.

3. Surgical Changes

Touch only what you must.

  • Do not refactor unrelated code.
  • Do not rewrite nearby formatting or comments without reason.
  • Match the local code style.
  • Only clean up code made obsolete by your own change.

Every changed line should connect directly to the task.

4. Goal-Driven Execution

Define success criteria and verify them.

  • Reproduce bugs before fixing them when feasible.
  • Prefer tests or direct checks over vague confidence.
  • Use a short plan for multi-step work.

Example:

1. reproduce issue -> verify: failing test or failing check
2. implement minimal fix -> verify: issue no longer reproduces
3. run regression checks -> verify: related behavior still passes

Usage

Merge this skill with repository-specific instructions, framework conventions, and testing requirements.

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. 11d ago First seen · 73 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A 588c971cdf38

Subscribe to this mod's changes

karpathy-guidelines is a skill published in the GitHub repository Vincent-A-Yang/karpathy-skills-anycoding (3 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 427 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-31.

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