Karpathy Coder

Enforces Andrej Karpathy's four coding principles—surface assumptions, keep it simple, make surgical changes, define verifiable goals—through review tooling and pre-commit checks. Use when writing, reviewing, or committing code to catch overcomplicated solutions and hidden assumptions before they ship.

skills.sh installs: 1.1K
GitHub stars: 29.5K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add alirezarezvani/claude-skills --skill karpathy-coder --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Karpathy Coder — Active Coding Discipline

Derived from Andrej Karpathy's observations on LLM coding pitfalls. This is not just guidelines — it ships Python tools that detect violations, a review agent, a slash command, and a pre-commit hook.

"The models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They don't manage their confusion, don't seek clarifications, don't surface inconsistencies, don't present tradeoffs, don't push back when they should."

"They really like to overcomplicate code and APIs, bloat abstractions, don't clean up dead code... implement a bloated construction over 1000 lines when 100 would do."

"LLMs are exceptionally good at looping until they meet specific goals... Don't tell it what to do, give it success criteria and watch it go."

— Andrej Karpathy