Andrej Karpathy Skills

Andrej Karpathy Skills is a single CLAUDE.md instruction file for AI coding assistants, with more than 224,000 stars on GitHub under the MIT license. It encodes Andrej Karpathy’s observations on how LLMs go wrong when writing code as four working principles any Claude Code or Cursor user can adopt in minutes.

Overview

Karpathy’s critique was blunt: models make wrong assumptions and run with them without checking, they overcomplicate code and bloat abstractions, and they quietly change or remove code they do not understand. This repository distills that critique into a compact set of behavioral guidelines. Drop the file into a project and the assistant is instructed to state its assumptions, prefer the simplest solution that works, touch only the lines the task requires, and define verifiable success criteria before looping toward them.

Key Features

• Think Before Coding: The assistant surfaces assumptions, present multiple interpretations when a request is ambiguous, push back when a simpler approach exists, and stop to ask when something is unclear.
• Simplicity First: Minimum code that solves the problem: no speculative features, no single-use abstractions, no unrequested configurability. If 200 lines could be 50, rewrite.
• Surgical Changes: Every edit stays traceable to the request. Adjacent code, comments, and formatting are left alone, existing style is matched, and only the orphans a change itself creates get cleaned up.
• Goal-Driven Execution: Imperative tasks become declarative goals with tests. “Fix the bug” turns into “write a test that reproduces it, then make it pass,” so the model can loop until the criteria are met.
• Two-minute installation: Install it as a Claude Code plugin through the plugin marketplace to use it across all projects, or fetch the file with one curl command into a project root, appending it to an existing CLAUDE.md.
• Cursor support included: The repository ships a committed Cursor project rule, so the same principles apply when the project is opened in Cursor instead of Claude Code.

💳 Pricing

Andrej Karpathy Skills is free and open source under the MIT license. There is no paid tier, no account, and nothing to run: the deliverable is a Markdown file you copy into your own projects and freely customize.

Who Is It For

For developers who use Claude Code or Cursor daily and are tired of bloated diffs, drive-by refactors, and silent wrong assumptions — and for teams who want a shared, reviewable baseline for how their assistant should behave.