abdullahhameedkhan/karpathy-ponytail-skills
Developer toolsKarpathy's LLM coding guidelines merged with Ponytail's laziness ladder, think before coding, climb the simplicity ladder, touch only what you must.
개요
A single CLAUDE.md merging Andrej Karpathy's LLM coding guidelines with Ponytail's laziness ladder, for use with Claude Code and other AI coding agents. Karpathy identified the core failure modes: "The models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They don't manage their confusion, don't seek clarifications, don't surface inconsistencies, don't present tradeoffs, don't push back when they should." "They really like to overcomplicate code and APIs, bloat abstractions, don't clean up dead code... implement a bloated construction over 1000 lines when 100 would do." "They still sometimes change/remove comments and code they don't sufficiently understand as side effects, even if orthogonal to the task." Ponytail added the concrete decision ladder Karpathy's simplicity rule was missing: "The best code is the code never written. Stop at the first rung that holds: does this need to exist at all? Already in the codebase? Stdlib?
README
karpathy-ponytail-skills
A single CLAUDE.md merging Andrej Karpathy’s LLM coding guidelines with Ponytail’s laziness ladder, for use with Claude Code and other AI coding agents.
Why
Karpathy identified the core failure modes:
“The models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They don’t manage their confusion, don’t seek clarifications, don’t surface inconsistencies, don’t present tradeoffs, don’t push back when they should.”
“They really like to overcomplicate code and APIs, bloat abstractions, don’t clean up dead code… implement a bloated construction over 1000 lines when 100 would do.”
“They still sometimes change/remove comments and code they don’t sufficiently understand as side effects, even if orthogonal to the task.”
Ponytail added the concrete decision ladder Karpathy’s simplicity rule was missing:
“The best code is the code never written. Stop at the first rung that holds: does this need to exist at all? Already in the codebase? Stdlib? Native platform? Existing dependency? One line? Only then: minimum code that works.”
This repo merges both into one file.
What’s inside
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
CLAUDE.md |
Drop into any project root — Claude Code loads it automatically |
AGENTS.md |
Same content — for Codex, OpenCode, and agents that read AGENTS.md |
skills/karpathy-ponytail/SKILL.md |
Claude Code plugin skill with frontmatter |
.cursor/rules/karpathy-ponytail.mdc |
Cursor project rule — always-on |
Install
Option 1 — Copy into your project (one project):
curl -o CLAUDE.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AbdullahHameedKhan/karpathy-ponytail-skills/main/CLAUDE.md
Option 2 — Append to an existing CLAUDE.md:
echo "" >> CLAUDE.md
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AbdullahHameedKhan/karpathy-ponytail-skills/main/CLAUDE.md >> CLAUDE.md
Option 3 — Claude Code plugin (all projects):
Inside a Claude Code session:
/plugin marketplace add AbdullahHameedKhan/karpathy-ponytail-skills
/plugin install karpathy-ponytail@karpathy-ponytail
The five principles
- Think Before Coding — surface tradeoffs, ask before assuming, name confusion
- Simplicity — The Ladder — 7-rung decision ladder from YAGNI to minimum working code
- Surgical Changes — touch only what you must, clean up only your own mess
- Bug Fixes — root cause not symptom, grep all callers, fix the shared function once
- Goal-Driven Execution — define success criteria, loop until verified
Sources
- Andrej Karpathy’s observations on LLM coding pitfalls
- DietrichGebert/ponytail — MIT License
추천 도구
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설치
npx skillfish add abdullahhameedkhan/karpathy-ponytail-skills