Karpathy check

Skill srg-sphynx/MDForge/Sources/MDForge/Resources/SkillLibrary/Development/karpathy-check

Run Karpathy's 4-principle review on staged changes or the last commit. Checks complexity, diff noise, hidden assumptions, and goal verification. Usage /karpathy-check [--last-commit]From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add srg-sphynx/MDForge --skill karpathy-check

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

0 stars0 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

SKILL.md

2.0 KB, 466 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

/karpathy-check

Review your staged changes (or last commit) against Karpathy's 4 coding principles.

Usage

/karpathy-check                 # review staged changes
/karpathy-check --last-commit   # review the most recent commit

What it runs

Principle #2 (Simplicity): engineering/karpathy-coder/skills/karpathy-coder/scripts/complexity_checker.py on all changed files — detects over-engineering, premature abstractions, deep nesting, long functions
Principle #3 (Surgical): engineering/karpathy-coder/skills/karpathy-coder/scripts/diff_surgeon.py on the diff — detects comment-only changes, whitespace noise, style drift, drive-by refactors
Principles #1 + #4 (Think + Goals): The karpathy-reviewer agent reads the diff and applies human-judgment checks — hidden assumptions, missing verification

Output

A structured report with per-principle verdicts and specific line-level fix recommendations.

When to run

Before committing (catches noise and overcomplication early)
After completing a feature (sanity check before PR)
When you suspect the LLM overcoded something

Sub-agent

Dispatches the karpathy-reviewer agent. See agents/karpathy-reviewer.md.

Scripts

engineering/karpathy-coder/skills/karpathy-coder/scripts/complexity_checker.py
engineering/karpathy-coder/skills/karpathy-coder/scripts/diff_surgeon.py
engineering/karpathy-coder/skills/karpathy-coder/scripts/assumption_linter.py
engineering/karpathy-coder/skills/karpathy-coder/scripts/goal_verifier.py

Skill Reference

→ engineering/karpathy-coder/skills/karpathy-coder/SKILL.md

What ships with it

Read from the repository

Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.