Karpathy Coder

Karpathy Coder

Use when writing, reviewing, or committing code to enforce Karpathy's 4 coding principles — surface assumptions before coding, keep it simple, make surgical changes, define verifiable goals. Triggers on "review my diff", "check complexity", "am I overcomplicating this", "karpathy check", "before I commit", or any code quality concern where the LLM might be overcoding.

Optimized workflow

This edition turns the source methodology into a repeatable agent workflow with explicit inputs, checkpoints and deliverables.

Quality standard

• Confirm scope and missing inputs before execution
• Ground decisions in available evidence and preserve source constraints
• Return an actionable result with assumptions, risks and next steps

Agent compatibility

The same core method is packaged for Claude, Codex, GPT, Gemini, Cursor and OpenCode.