Karpathy-Inspired Claude Code Guidelines

Created by Jiayuan Zhang, Karpathy-Inspired Claude Code Guidelines is a single CLAUDE.md file designed to address common LLM coding pitfalls identified by Andrej Karpathy. It enforces four core principles — Think Before Coding, Simplicity First, Surgical Changes, and Goal-Driven Execution — to reduce overcomplication, unnecessary edits, and silent wrong assumptions. The file can be installed as a Claude Code plugin or dropped directly into any project, and also ships with a Cursor rule for cross-editor compatibility.

• Think Before Coding — Forces the model to state assumptions explicitly, surface ambiguity, present tradeoffs, and ask for clarification rather than guessing silently.
• Simplicity First — Instructs the model to write the minimum code that solves the problem, avoiding speculative features, unnecessary abstractions, and over-engineered solutions.
• Surgical Changes — Restricts edits to only what the user requested; the model must not refactor adjacent code, remove pre-existing dead code, or alter unrelated comments.
• Goal-Driven Execution — Transforms imperative tasks into verifiable success criteria with explicit verification steps, enabling the model to loop independently until goals are met.
• Claude Code Plugin install — Add the marketplace with /plugin marketplace add forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills, then install with /plugin install andrej-karpathy-skills@karpathy-skills to apply guidelines across all projects.
• Per-project CLAUDE.md install — Run curl -o CLAUDE.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills/main/CLAUDE.md in any project directory for immediate effect.
• Cursor integration — A committed .cursor/rules/karpathy-guidelines.mdc file applies the same four principles when the project is opened in Cursor.
• Customizable — Designed to be merged with project-specific instructions; add your own sections to the generated CLAUDE.md for team or repo-level conventions.