Karpathy llm coding guidelines

Skill kjuhwa/skills-hub/skills/engineering/karpathy-llm-coding-guidelines

Umbrella behavioral guideline that bundles the four Karpathy principles — Think Before Coding, Simplicity First, Surgical Changes, Goal-Driven Execution — to reduce common LLM coding mistakes. Use when you want all four applied at once.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add kjuhwa/skills-hub --skill karpathy-llm-coding-guidelines

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SKILL.md

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Karpathy LLM Coding Guidelines (Umbrella)

Four principles addressing the most common LLM coding pitfalls, derived from Andrej Karpathy's X post on LLM coding behavior.

Tradeoff: biases toward caution over speed. For trivial fixes, use judgment.

Principle	Addresses
Think Before Coding	Wrong assumptions, hidden confusion, missing tradeoffs
Simplicity First	Overcomplication, bloated abstractions
Surgical Changes	Orthogonal edits, drive-by refactors
Goal-Driven Execution	Vague "make it work" loops, missing verification

See dedicated skills:

think-before-coding-surface-assumptions
simplicity-first-minimum-viable-code
surgical-changes-only-touch-requested
goal-driven-verifiable-success-criteria

Success signals

Fewer unnecessary changes in diffs.
Fewer rewrites due to overcomplication.
Clarifying questions come before implementation, not after.
Clean, minimal PRs — no drive-by refactoring.

Source

Karpathy's observations paraphrased: LLMs "make wrong assumptions and run along"; "like to overcomplicate code and APIs, bloat abstractions"; "sometimes change/remove comments and code they don't sufficiently understand"; and conversely, "are exceptionally good at looping until they meet specific goals."

What ships with it

Read from the repository