Radar / AI coding tools / Karpathy Guidelines
Karpathy Guidelines: single CLAUDE.md file distilling Andrej Karpathy's coding-agent rules
A single CLAUDE.md (plus Cursor rules) encoding four principles from Andrej Karpathy's viral critique of LLM coding pitfalls: think before coding, simplicity first, surgical changes, and goal-driven execution with verifiable success criteria.
Why it matters
The most-starred prompt-engineering artifact on GitHub (218k stars): four prescriptions from Karpathy's own posts that anyone can drop into a project config — zero tooling, instant behavior change.
What you could build with it
An indie developer could add the Karpathy CLAUDE.md to every new project's config to get coding agents that clarify ambiguity before acting, keep diffs surgical, and loop on verifiable success criteria — cutting the costly hallucinated refactors that Karpathy described.
Does it hold up?
Frictionless to adopt — it's one markdown file — and 218k stars show the prescription resonates; there are no measured benchmarks, so evidence of quality gains is anecdotal, and the guidelines bias toward caution over speed.
Learn more
First spotted on github: source.
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