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Get Started Free →hashgraph-online/karpathy-guardrails
Behavioral guardrails for Cavekit agents. Four principles — think before coding, simplicity first, surgical changes, goal-driven execution — that prevent over-engineering, silent assumptions, scope creep, and unfocused work. Every task-builder, reviewer, planner, and inspector must internalize these before writing a single line. Trigger phrases: "guardrails", "karpathy", "scope creep", "over-engineering", "stop adding features", "surgical fix".
Passed 20 of 22 test cases with the skill, and 13 of 22 without it.
and 5 more in the full report
7 fixed13 passed either way2 still failing0 broke
Tokens, turns and time describe resource use, not a dollar price.
One of 7 test cases the skill fixed. Same model, same prompt, with and without the skill.
Write a Jest unit test function to verify that calculateTax(100, 0.2) returns 20 in pure JavaScript.
| Checked | Without skill | With skill |
|---|---|---|
| Uses expect(calculateTax(100, 0.2)).toBe(20) inside a Jest test block | Missed | Passed |
The instructions your model reads when the skill loads.
Four rules. Load them into context at the start of every task. The reviewer enforces them as a Pass-1 filter before it looks at code quality.
Before the first edit, write down:
NEEDS_CONTEXT and ask — do not guess.revision skill (automated-trace subsection), not a vague attempt.Refusing to produce code is allowed. A task with unknown scope is a spec bug, not a coding task.
The correct amount of code is the minimum that meets the acceptance criteria.
If the diff is larger than the acceptance criteria seem to demand, explain why in the commit body. If you cannot, trim the diff.
Every line in the diff must trace back to an acceptance criterion. Touching code outside the task's owned files is justified only when a requirement forces it. Examples of violations:
test cases passed, vs 13 / 22 without
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