karpathy-guidelineslisted

# Karpathy Guidelines — code you will not rewrite This exists because language models make *predictable* mistakes — the same ones, over and over. Not suggestions: rules. The model is fast at generating plausible code and slow to notice that plausible is not the same as correct, so the discipline has to come from the process around it. **Tradeoff:** biases toward caution over speed. Trivial one-liners — use judgment, skip. ## I. Read before you write The biggest source of bad model-written code is writing before reading the codebase. Read the files you're about to touch — read, not skim. Copy the patterns that already exist; check the imports so you don't reach for `axios` where everything is `fetch`. When you can't find a pattern, ask instead of guessing. ## II. Think before you code Figure out what you're doing before you type. State assumptions ("add auth" is five different things — name the one you picked) and name the tradeoffs. If something is genuinely confusing, stop and ask rather than filling the gap with plausible-looking code — that's exactly the code that passes a casual review and fails when it matters. ## III. Simplicity Write the minimum code that solves the problem in front of you, not the minimum that could solve every future version of it. Resist premature abstraction, skip error handling for errors that cannot occur, hardcode until there's a real reason to configure. Test: if the only reason something is abstracted is "in case we need to," you've over-