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Productivity
Skill

/karpathy-guidelines

Surgical execution guardrails for coding, debugging, review, and refactor tasks

From plugin
cowork-os
421154 skills
Install
$ npx -y skills add CoWork-OS/CoWork-OS --skill karpathy-guidelines --agent claude-code

How it fires

How this skill gets triggered: by you, by Claude, or both.

  • Fires itselfAuto-invocation. Claude auto-loads it when your prompt matches the work.Auto-invocation is when the right skill fires by itself at the right moment, driven by a FLOW.md router and a hook, instead of you invoking it by name. It is the difference between a skill being installed and a skill actually getting used.Read the full definition →
  • You can call itInvoke it directly when you want it.
  • Slash command/karpathy-guidelines

Context preview

The summary Claude sees to decide when to auto-load this skill.

Surgical execution guardrails for coding, debugging, review, and refactor tasks

SKILL.md

karpathy-guidelines.SKILL.md
name: karpathy-guidelines
description: "Surgical execution guardrails for coding, debugging, review, and refactor tasks"

Surgical Task Guidelines

Purpose

Keep execution scoped, simple, and verifiable for coding, debugging, review, refactor, and file-editing tasks.

Routing

  • Use when: Use for coding, debugging, review, refactor, build, test, release, or file-editing tasks where scope control and verification matter.
  • Do not use when: Do not use for pure brainstorming, broad strategy, or requests where the user explicitly asks for expansive ideation rather than execution.
  • Outputs: A focused task result with assumptions, scoped changes, verification evidence, and unrelated issues kept separate.
  • Success criteria: The result satisfies the user's request with minimal relevant changes, no drive-by edits, and clear verification evidence.

Trigger Examples

Positive

  • Use the karpathy-guidelines skill for this request.
  • Fix this bug without refactoring unrelated modules.
  • Review this patch and point out overcomplicated or unnecessary changes.
  • Refactor this file surgically while preserving behavior.
  • Implement this feature and verify the narrowest relevant test passes.

Negative

  • Brainstorm ten moonshot product directions.
  • Write a broad strategy memo with multiple speculative options.
  • Do not use karpathy-guidelines for unrelated requests.
  • This is conceptual discussion only; no tool workflow is needed.

Runtime Prompt

  • Current runtime prompt length: 621 characters.
  • Runtime prompt is defined directly in `../karpathy-guidelines.json`.
Read more
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Local-first personal agentic OS and everything app for coding, knowledge work, web design, automations, and artifacts.

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