Karpathy Guidelines skill
A short set of rules for coding agents, distilled from Andrej Karpathy's observations about where LLMs go wrong in code: think before coding, make surgical changes, surface assumptions instead of guessing, and define a verifiable success check before starting. It ships as a skill, as a single CLAUDE.md, and as a Cursor rule in the same repository.
Why it matters
It fixes the habits that make agent diffs hard to review: overbuilt abstractions, drive-by edits and silent assumptions. With 232,767 GitHub stars on 13 November 2026, only Matt Pocock's skills and Superpowers have more in this list.
How to install Karpathy Guidelines
- With the skills CLI. One command copies the skill into your project:
npx skills add multica-ai/andrej-karpathy-skills --skill karpathy-guidelines - In Claude Code, by hand. Copy the
karpathy-guidelinesfolder from the repository into.claude/skills/in your project, or into~/.claude/skills/to use it everywhere. - In AGNT. Download AGNT free, then add the skill folder from Skills → Import. It runs with the model you choose, next to your agents, workflows and memory.
Source and maintenance
| Repository | multica-ai/andrej-karpathy-skills |
| Skill folder | karpathy-guidelines |
| GitHub stars (13 November 2026) | 232,767 |
| Last commit | 20 Apr 2026 |
| Category | Development & Coding |
| Ranked | #13 in The 100 Best AI Agent Skills in 2027 |
Checked against GitHub on 13 November 2026.
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