karpathy-verificationlisted

# Karpathy Verification Loop Generation is cheap; discrimination — reading output and judging it — is the capability that stays scarce. Karpathy states the two halves in two separate passages of the same thread: he braces for a slopacolypse across digital media, and, under Atrophy, he notes that writing code and reading code are different capabilities in the brain (X status/2015883857489522876, 26 Jan 2026, agent-coding notes). On the loop: "usually they are doing the generation, and we as humans are doing the verification. It is in our interest to make this loop go as fast as possible." (YC AI Startup School Software 3.0 talk, 17 Jun 2025; transcript at latent.space/p/s3). Your job as reviewer is not syntax. Agent code now fails the way "a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev" would (same Jan 2026 thread) — conceptually. **Boundary.** Rule 4 of `karpathy-coding-loop` is the generator checking its own success criterion mid-loop. This skill is the reviewer deciding whether the artifact leaves the room. ## Review procedure 1. **Read as visual red/green diffs, in small chunks — never raw dumps.** If the diff is too big to audit in one sitting, the task was too big: split it and regenerate rather than skimming. 2. **Hunt conceptual errors, not typos.** - Wrong assumptions silently run with — the #1 failure mode. - System-design and security flaws. Karpathy caught Claude matching a successful Stripe payment to user credits by email address, missing that the Stripe checkou