karpathy-coding-rules SKILL.md skillA
karpathy-coding-rules from pengqianhan/ai-human-research-os is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add pengqianhan/ai-human-research-os/karpathy-coding-rules@git:20260715.38d79bePins git:20260715.38d79be in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- pengqianhan/ai-human-research-os
- Path
research-skills-hub/open-paper-skills/karpathy-coding-rules/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 1
- Latest version
- git:20260715.38d79be, committed Jul 15, 2026
- Size
- 4,842 bytes
- Repository stars
- 3
- License
- MIT
Andrej Karpathy's field notes (CLAUDE.md, v260626) on getting a language model to write code you will NOT have to rewrite — ten earned rules covering read-before-write, think-before-code, simplicity, minimal/surgical diffs, verification, goal-driven execution, debugging, dependency hygiene, communication, and the common failure modes. Read and apply these BEFORE starting ANY coding task: writing new code, editing or refactoring existing code, fixing a bug, adding a feature, implementing from a…
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
### I. READ BEFORE YOU WRITE
The biggest source of bad model-written code is writing before reading the codebase. Read the files you are about to touch; read, not skim. Copy the patterns that already exist, and check the imports to see what the project actually depends on, so you do not reach for axios where everything is fetch. When you cannot find a pattern, ask instead of guessing.
### II. THINK BEFORE YOU CODE
Figure out what you are doing before you type. State your assumptions ("add authentication" is five different things, so name the one you picked) and name the tradeoffs. If something is genuinely confusing, stop and ask rather than filling the gap with plausible-looking code; that is exactly the code that passes a casual review and fails when it matters.
### III. SIMPLICITY
Write the minimum code that solves the problem in front of you now, not the minimum that could solve every future version of it. Resist premature abstraction, skip error handling for errors that cannot occur, and hardcode values until there is a real reason to configure them. The test: if the only reason something is abstracted is "in case we need to," you have over-built it.
…Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add pengqianhan/ai-human-research-os/karpathy-coding-rules@sha256:f89d384d86eeaac6The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260715.38d79be, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_xzwwcopuvkuww2p6)
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Versions
The registry has recorded 1 version of this file, committed on Jul 15, 2026.
Audit of the latest version
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- 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
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- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
pengqianhan/ai-human-research-os · 3 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-10-19 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_xzwwcopuvkuww2p6 GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=pengqianhan/ai-human-research-os/karpathy-coding-rules GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/f89d384d86eeaac62d807f24daab6101fd6c26ef3bb06dd77e264d86ea51f90a
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Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.