Introduction

Andrej Karpathy is one of the co-founders of OpenAI. He has pointed out several common flaws in how AI writes code today, such as: failing to ask questions when uncertain, instead making assumptions on its own and veering off course; a tendency to over-encapsulate simple concepts; and making unintended changes to parts of the code that shouldn’t be modified, leaving behind side effects.

This repository distills his observations into four principles, which are documented in a CLAUDE.md (and CURSOR.md) file:

  • Think Before Coding
  • Simplicity First
  • Surgical Changes
  • Goal-Driven Execution

Place this file in the project’s root directory, and Claude Code or Cursor will treat it as a style guide to follow.

Installation

Claude Code (plugin, recommended):

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/plugin marketplace add forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills
/plugin install andrej-karpathy-skills@karpathy-skills

Download directly to your project (compatible with Claude Code and Cursor):

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

Visit

Click the link below to visit the repository. Please give the original author a star!

🔗 github.com/multica-ai/andrej-karpathy-skills