karpathy-skills

karpathy-skills

A CLAUDE.md / Cursor rule / Claude Code plugin distilling Andrej Karpathy's actual coding pedagogy and writing voice into operational rules an LLM coding assistant can follow.

Built from a 9,001-tweet + 31-essay + 20-video soulprint of @karpathy (scraped 2026-04-17). Every principle is anchored in a verbatim Karpathy quote.

Inspired by forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills, but where that repo distills four principles from a single Karpathy tweet, this one is built from his complete public corpus — pedagogy patterns, voice conventions, signature moves, and dated predictions.

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The Six Principles

#	Principle	One-line form
1	Calibrate Confidence	Hedge mechanism, be bold on world-claims. (?) for ~60%.
2	Confess What's Ugly Up Front	Failure modes before solutions. Bugs live in plumbing.
3	Compress, Don't Bloat	"Everything else is just efficiency." 100 lines > 1000.
4	Surgical Changes	Every changed line traces to the user's request.
5	Close the Loop with Evidence	Demos are easy. Production is the march of nines.
6	Be Cheerfully Wrong — and Build the Ramp	Admit, update publicly, hand back something runnable.

Full text: CLAUDE.md.

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Why a richer version?

The original forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills repo is built from one Karpathy tweet about LLM coding pitfalls. It captures four useful principles. This repo is built from his entire public corpus, so it can carry:

• His confidence-by-scope rule (world-claims direct, mechanism hedged) — not just "don't assume."
• His "failure modes go up front" pedagogy — not just "ask clarifying questions."
• His "everything else is just efficiency" minimization line, used verbatim from 2022 to 2026.
• His march-of-nines patience model — anchored in Tesla Autopilot and Waymo 2014→2024.
• His cheerful self-correction pattern — not just "admit mistakes" but the tone (smiley, immediate, structural).
• His build-the-ramp thesis — output should be runnable, scaffolded, and copy-pasteable.
• His closing-move discipline — no response ends on a confident period.
• His voice — imo, kind of, (?), two-word parentheticals, pull-quoted punchlines, code-before-math.

Each principle is anchored in a real, dated, sourced Karpathy quote — not a paraphrase.

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Install

Option A — Cursor project rule

This repo includes .cursor/rules/karpathy-guidelines.mdc with alwaysApply: true. Drop the .cursor/ directory into any Cursor project and the rule applies automatically.

Option B — CLAUDE.md (per-project)

New project:

curl -o CLAUDE.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joshuawilson/karpathy-skills/main/CLAUDE.md

Existing project (append):

echo "" >> CLAUDE.md
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joshuawilson/karpathy-skills/main/CLAUDE.md >> CLAUDE.md

Option C — Claude Code plugin

/plugin marketplace add joshuawilson/karpathy-skills
/plugin install karpathy-skills@karpathy-skills

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How to know it's working

You should see, over time:

• Diffs that match the request line-for-line — no drive-by refactoring.
• Calibrated language — fewer "this is correct" claims, more "I think," "I checked," "I haven't verified."
• Failure modes named up front — fewer "actually it didn't work" follow-ups.
• Smaller PRs — 50 lines where there used to be 500.
• Cheerful corrections — when wrong, the assistant updates immediately rather than litigating.
• Runnable handoffs — every response ends with a command, a test, or a one-liner the user can copy.

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License

MIT. Karpathy quotes are reproduced under fair use; sources cited inline.

ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ