andrej-karpathy-skills

what it does

andrej-karpathy-skills is a CLAUDE.md file (and related skill primitives) derived from andrej karpathy’s public observations about how LLMs go wrong when writing code. it’s a single config file you drop into a claude code project to make claude write code more like karpathy thinks code should be written.

why it matters

it’s the first time a single human’s tacit knowledge has been packaged this aggressively as an agent primitive. not karpathy’s blog posts as bookmarks. not karpathy’s videos as RAG corpus. karpathy as executable claude config.

your favorite thinker stops being someone you read and starts being someone your agent inherits behavior from.

9,496 stars in days. that number tells you the appetite for this format is enormous.

what’s inside

• anti-pattern catalog — every common LLM coding mistake karpathy has called out, encoded as “do not do this” rules
• review heuristics — how karpathy reads code (look for hidden state, check tensor shapes, watch for off-by-ones)
• debugging style — print-debug first, instrument the loop, distrust silent success
• tokenization gotchas — the karpathy-flavored “tokenizers are weird and you will get bitten”
• training-loop instincts — what to log, what to plot, what to suspect when loss curves look “fine”

the pattern this opens up

karpathy is the first because karpathy is the most public. but the pattern generalizes:

• simon-willison-skills (datasette and CLI design)
• armin-ronacher-skills (rust + python ergonomics)
• mitchell-hashimoto-skills (terminal apps and infra)
• your-name-skills (your own old blog posts compiled into rules your future agent inherits)

self.md calls this the living appendix: the section of your personal AI OS where the people whose taste you trust most become reusable function calls.

install

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills/main/CLAUDE.md

drop into the root of any claude code project. claude reads it on every session.

related

• anthropic-skills — official skills format
• ok-skills — curated multi-tool skill library
• awesome-design-md — same pattern, applied to UI design