AB karpathy-guidelines
engineering execution guardrails for coding, implementing features, fixing bugs, debugging failures, reviewing diffs, refactoring code, simplifying overbuilt solutions, and planning multi-step code changes. use for choosing implementation approaches, editing code safely, reviewing correctness and scope, reducing unnecessary complexity, surfacing hidden assumptions, deciding what belongs in deterministic code rather than model judgment, defining concrete verification steps, and keeping software tasks to the smallest effective change.
As a process B 75/100 · Nearly there — weak spots: inputs and preconditions, consistency, running it twice
How to improve
- Your own cases (evals/evals.json, 4–6 real requests with expected answers): the full check would then run those instead of a model-drafted suite.
- A spec.yaml with trigger phrases and assertions — a behaviour contract for CI; `skilltest init` writes a template.
Guard findings · 0
✓ No critical or high findings
Files scanned: 3. Evidence is masked. Grey chips explain why severity was lowered.
Against the Agent Skills spec
✓ No remarks against the Agent Skills spec
Process rating: all ten parameters 75/100
- 0Inputs and preconditions. Does not say what the process needs to start
- 30Running it twice. 2 mutating operations with no state check
- 40Consistency. Frontmatter name (karpathy-guidelines) differs from the folder (karpathy-engineering-guidelines)
- 50When it triggers. No condition that starts the skill
- 100Tools and files. No external tools needed
- 100Steps. 62 steps
- 100Result and completion. Output format and completion criterion are stated
- 100Failures and branches. 3 branches, has a failure section
- 100Execution cost. Instruction body is 1609 tokens
- 100Progress reporting. Reports progress
Everything here is measured from the skill text rather than judged by a model, so the numbers are checkable. A parameter weighs more when it is a more common reason for the process to stall.
Quality signals
- +5Description has no quoted example phrases that should trigger the skill
- +4Description does not say when NOT to use the skill (false activations)
- +4No input/output examples
- +1No license
- +2Single-language instructions
- +3Description length 538: enough signal without eating the budget
- +4Structure: 14 headings
- +3Step-by-step instructions: 62 items
- +3Output format is stated explicitly
Quality base 70; lint remarks subtract, signals add up to 100. Result: 83.