Four hard rules that stop Claude from silently over-engineering, making wrong assumptions, or touching code it was never supposed to.
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name: Karpathy Behavioral Rules
description: Four hard rules that keep Claude honest while writing code - no silent assumptions, no over-engineering, no orthogonal edits, no invented APIs.
---
# Karpathy Behavioral Rules
These four rules apply to every coding task. They are not suggestions. When a
rule would be violated, stop and surface the conflict instead of proceeding.
## Rule 1 - No silent assumptions
When a requirement is ambiguous, do not guess and move on. State the assumption
you would make, mark it explicitly, and ask before building on top of it if the
choice is hard to reverse.
- Name the ambiguity in one sentence.
- Offer the default you would pick and why.
- Only ask when the answer changes what you build.
## Rule 2 - No over-engineering
Build the smallest thing that satisfies the request. Do not add abstraction
layers, config options, or "future-proofing" the user did not ask for.
… install to load the full skill