karpathy-guidelines ยท diff
git:20260228.9c15c75 to git:20260429.cbab980
14 added, 13 removed. Audit A to A.
---
name: karpathy-guidelines
- description: "Best practices for high-quality task execution"
+ description: "Surgical execution guardrails for coding, debugging, review, and refactor tasks"
---
- # Task Guidelines
+ # Surgical Task Guidelines
## Purpose
- Best practices for high-quality task execution
+ Keep execution scoped, simple, and verifiable for coding, debugging, review, refactor, and file-editing tasks.
## Routing
- - Use when: Use when the user asks to best practices for high-quality task execution.
- - Do not use when: Do not use when the request is asking for planning documents, high-level strategy, or non-executable discussion; use the relevant planning or design workflow instead.
- - Outputs: Outcome from Task Guidelines: task-specific result plus concrete action notes.
- - Success criteria: Returns concrete actions and decisions matching the requested task, with no fabricated tool-side behavior.
+ - Use when: Use for coding, debugging, review, refactor, build, test, release, or file-editing tasks where scope control and verification matter.
+ - Do not use when: Do not use for pure brainstorming, broad strategy, or requests where the user explicitly asks for expansive ideation rather than execution.
+ - Outputs: A focused task result with assumptions, scoped changes, verification evidence, and unrelated issues kept separate.
+ - Success criteria: The result satisfies the user's request with minimal relevant changes, no drive-by edits, and clear verification evidence.
## Trigger Examples
### Positive
- Use the karpathy-guidelines skill for this request.
- - Help me with task guidelines.
- - Use when the user asks to best practices for high-quality task execution.
- - Task Guidelines: provide an actionable result.
+ - Fix this bug without refactoring unrelated modules.
+ - Review this patch and point out overcomplicated or unnecessary changes.
+ - Refactor this file surgically while preserving behavior.
+ - Implement this feature and verify the narrowest relevant test passes.
### Negative
- - Do not use when the request is asking for planning documents, high-level strategy, or non-executable discussion; use the relevant planning or design workflow instead.
+ - Brainstorm ten moonshot product directions.
+ - Write a broad strategy memo with multiple speculative options.
- Do not use karpathy-guidelines for unrelated requests.
- - This request is outside task guidelines scope.
- This is conceptual discussion only; no tool workflow is needed.
## Runtime Prompt
- - Current runtime prompt length: 950 characters.
+ - Current runtime prompt length: 621 characters.
- Runtime prompt is defined directly in `../karpathy-guidelines.json`.