Home / athola / claude-night-market · plugins/imbue/skills/karpathy-principles/SKILL.md · GitHub

karpathy-principles skillA

karpathy-principles is agent-read markdown (skill) from athola/claude-night-market: Pre-implementation gate covering think-first, simplicity, surgical edits, and verifiable goals. Use when starting implementation to verify the approach..

Indexed from public GitHub and served as immutable, content-addressed versions. Install it pinned to an exact SHA-256 with the mdr CLI, and every file is verified against the hash recorded here before it reaches your agent. The deterministic audit below grades the latest version, and the same file always earns the same grade.

What the file says

> 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.
>
> (Andrej Karpathy, on agentic coding failure modes)

## What This Is

A four-principle contract for reducing the most common
LLM coding pitfalls. Compact entry-point. Each
principle has a deeper-dive skill in night-market;
this skill is the index, not the encyclopedia.

Derivation: distilled by Forrest Chang
(forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills, MIT) from
Karpathy's observations. Full attribution in
`references/source-attribution.md`.

## When To Use

- Before starting any coding task larger than a typo
- During code review, to name the failure mode you see
- After writing a diff, to self-audit before claiming
  done
- When training a junior engineer to read agent diffs

## When NOT to Use

These principles bias toward caution over speed. For
cases listed in `modules/tradeoff-acknowledgment.md`,
use judgment: trivial fixes, exploratory spikes,
documentation-only edits, and time-boxed prototypes.

## The Four Principles
…

Read the whole file at its exact version.

How to install

Latest version
mdr add athola/claude-night-market/karpathy-principles@git:20260713.f98719b
Exact content
mdr add athola/claude-night-market/karpathy-principles@sha256:b5e5e4c133a0f404

Pin to a label to follow the author's releases, or to a sha256 to freeze the exact bytes forever. Either way the resolved hash is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install reproduces it on any machine.

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Versions

versioncommittedcommitsizeaudit
git:20260713.f98719b latest2026-07-13 f98719b 8,079 BA view · diff
git:20260601.8d672122026-06-01 8d67212 8,079 BA view · diff
git:20260531.36e78062026-05-31 36e7806 8,083 BA view · diff
git:20260529.62f598e2026-05-29 62f598e 7,393 BA view · diff
git:20260521.6f5c7d92026-05-21 6f5c7d9 7,391 BA view

Audit of the latest version

A  17 of 17 checks passed. Deterministic, no model, same answer every run.
  • pass: Frontmatter block present
  • pass: Frontmatter declares a name
  • pass: Frontmatter declares a description
  • pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (8079 bytes)
  • pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
  • pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
  • pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
  • pass: No credential-shaped string
  • pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
  • pass: No text hidden with inline styles
  • pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
  • pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
  • pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
  • pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
  • pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
  • pass: No link to a raw IP address
  • pass: No script tag

Source

GitHub

athola/claude-night-market · 338 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-09-22 · branch master

API

GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_2diipfkvookpxgwo
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=athola/claude-night-market/karpathy-principles
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/b5e5e4c133a0f4041a024355eab594679f2317d078bb807e72713bf1faebb7fe

Your agent does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.

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