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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.
Docker best practices: image security, build efficiency, runtime hardening, Compose, local tooling (Colima, OrbStack). Use when writing or reviewing Dockerfiles and Compose files.
AWS best practices: IAM, secrets, networking, security, compute, IaC, ops. Use when building, reviewing, or modifying AWS resources.
GCP best practices: IAM, secrets, networking, security, compute, IaC, ops. Use when building, reviewing, or modifying GCP resources.
Idiomatic Go 1.25 practices: errors, interfaces, concurrency, generics, testing, security, tooling. Use when writing or reviewing Go code.
Modern Java practices: design, errors, concurrency, security, testing, tooling. Targets Java 21 LTS baseline; Java 25 LTS features called out explicitly. Use when writing or reviewing Java code.
Kubernetes best practices: security, workloads, networking, config, operations, GitOps. Use when writing or reviewing K8s manifests and configurations.
| name | karpathy-guidelines |
| tags | ["core"] |
| description | 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. |
| license | MIT |
| source | https://github.com/forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills |
Derived from Andrej Karpathy's observations on common LLM coding mistakes. Biases toward caution over speed. Apply judgment on trivial tasks.
When editing existing code:
When your changes create orphans:
Every changed line must trace directly to the user's request.
Transform tasks into verifiable goals before starting:
For multi-step tasks, state a brief plan first:
1. [Step] → verify: [check]
2. [Step] → verify: [check]
3. [Step] → verify: [check]
Strong success criteria → loop independently to completion.