There’s a GitHub repo at forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills that’s sitting at 97.8k stars. It’s a single CLAUDE.md file with four behavioral rules for Claude Code, derived from Andrej Karpathy’s observations about LLM coding failure modes.

The four rules:

1. Think Before Coding — ask instead of assuming

2. Simplicity First — no abstractions nobody asked for

3. Surgical Changes — touch only what you must, every diff line traces to the request

4. Goal-Driven Execution — define success criteria, loop until met

I’ve been using it for a few weeks. The one that made the biggest difference for me is Surgical Changes. Before, I’d ask for a bug fix and get a 40-line diff with type hints, reformatted quotes, and renamed variables mixed in with the actual fix. Now the diff is clean.

Has anyone else tried it? Curious whether the “simplicity first” rule causes problems in codebases that genuinely need abstractions — I’ve had to work around it a couple of times.

Installation is one command:

/plugin marketplace add forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills

/plugin install andrej-karpathy-skills@karpathy-skills