Agent skills
Karpathy Skills
Turning Andrej Karpathy's notes on how LLMs code badly into rules an agent will actually follow.
- source
- multica-ai
- licence
- None
- verified
- 2026-08-22
Restated as instructions an agent can act on: think before coding, write the minimum that solves the problem, keep changes surgical, and define what success looks like before starting.
The four rules, and why they are the four
Each one targets a specific way a competent-looking model output goes wrong:
| Rule | The failure it prevents |
|---|---|
| Think before coding | Picking one reading of an ambiguous request silently, then building it |
| Simplicity first | 200 lines of speculative flexibility for a problem that needed 50 |
| Surgical changes | Improving adjacent code nobody asked about, burying the real diff |
| Goal-driven execution | "Make it work" as a success criterion, which cannot be checked |
R21's own workspace guidelines borrow from these openly, and the third one earns its keep most often. A diff where every changed line traces to the request is reviewable in minutes; the same change with drive-by refactoring is not, and the cost lands on the reviewer rather than on whoever wrote it.
Listed as a reference, not as a dependency
Two things were checked against the registry rather than carried over from a note, and both changed how this is treated:
- The repo moved. It began at
forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skillsand now resolves tomultica-ai/andrej-karpathy-skills. A link written before the move still works, which is exactly why nobody notices a move. - There is no LICENSE file at the repo root as of 2026-08-22. Not a permissive licence, not a restrictive one — none. Default copyright terms therefore apply.
So R21 reads it and credits it, and does not vendor it. That distinction matters for a public site: crediting an author is always fine, and copying unlicensed work into a repository is not, no matter how freely it was shared.
A name worth disambiguating
Three separate things get conflated, and R21 conflated two of them internally before this entry was written. This skill set is derived from Karpathy's observations and maintained by someone else. The LLM-wiki structure some of R21's knowledge base is built on is a different lineage. And Graphify is neither — it is Graphify-Labs' work, and has no connection to Karpathy at all.
A missing licence and a moved repository are both facts worth publishing rather than quietly working around.
Verified against the GitHub API on 2026-08-22: no license detected, 205,305 stars.