karpathy-guidelines is agent-read markdown (skill) from jnpiyush/agentx: Behavioral guidelines to reduce common LLM coding mistakes. Use when writing, reviewing, or refactoring code to avoid overcomplication, make surgical changes, surface assumptions, and define verifiable success criteria. Adapted from Andrej Karpathy's observations on LLM coding pitfalls..
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
# Karpathy Guidelines
Behavioral guidelines to reduce common LLM coding mistakes. Adapted from
[Andrej Karpathy's observations](https://x.com/karpathy/status/2015883857489522876)
on LLM coding pitfalls and the upstream MIT-licensed
[karpathy-guidelines skill](https://github.com/multica-ai/andrej-karpathy-skills/blob/main/skills/karpathy-guidelines/SKILL.md).
> **MANDATORY in Frontier**: These four guidelines are NON-optional for every
> Frontier execution (coding, refactor, review, pipeline). Complete the
> "Self-Check Before Handoff" checklist before any handoff. See the always-on
> rule in `.github/instructions/project-conventions.instructions.md`.
**Tradeoff:** These guidelines bias toward caution over speed. The only
exemption is a genuinely trivial change (single-line typo, obvious config
rename) whose success criteria are self-evident.
## When to Use
Load this skill when:
- Writing new code or features
- Refactoring or modifying existing code
- Reviewing code (yours or another agent''s)
- Debugging when the cause is not obvious
- Producing pipelines, IaC, or any artifact that ships to production
…
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.
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_zd5fxnazgbklisv6
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=jnpiyush/agentx/karpathy-guidelines
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/6088806bd4286c4276ebb2b124ab8d46890386d03b7b6e081f657691289ee1e9
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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