karpathy-context-engineeringlisted

# Karpathy Context Engineering The model is "a coworker with Anterograde amnesia" (X status/1930003172246073412, Jun 2025, LLM memory analogy): the context window is working memory, the weights are hazy recollection of an older internet. Anything load-bearing must be IN the window explicitly — Karpathy's term for the job is context engineering, "filling the context window with just the right information for the next step" (X status/1937902205765607626, 25 Jun 2025). ## Symptom -> Fix | Symptom | Fix | |---------|-----| | Hallucinated or deprecated API | Paste the current official docs, then retry | | Long session getting dull | Fresh session; carry over a written summary only | | Same mistake, third time | Write it as a rule in `~/.claude/KARPATHY.md` or the matching skill | | Model guessing at repo conventions | State the deviations explicitly; flatten the repo into context | | Re-explaining a topic every session | Build an agent-maintained wiki page for it | | An error you are paraphrasing | Paste it verbatim, no commentary; that alone usually fixes it | | Whole repo needed | Flatten it into one pasteable text with gitingest or DeepWiki (house rule) | | Hard problem answered instantly | Force step-by-step work; models need tokens to think | ## Practices **Keep the window short and relevant.** - Start a new session per topic. Stale tokens degrade accuracy, speed and cost. - Load the relevant sections of files and docs, not whole dumps. - Never demand an immediate final