Andrej Karpathy Skills (Cursor & VS Code)

Adds Karpathy-inspired coding guidelines as AI rules in Cursor or VS Code—one command and the guidelines are in your project so the assistant follows them in every chat.

Disclaimer: This plugin was written using the Cursor agent as part of the Samotics AI Challenge Day.

How to use

After installing, open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P / Cmd+Shift+P):

• Karpathy Rules: Add to project (.cursor/rules) — adds the guidelines to .cursor/rules/ with alwaysApply: true (recommended for Cursor).
• Karpathy Rules: Add to .cursorrules (legacy) — appends to .cursorrules in the project root.

The four principles

1. Think Before Coding — Don’t assume; surface tradeoffs and ask when unclear.
2. Simplicity First — Minimum code, no speculative features or abstractions.
3. Surgical Changes — Touch only what’s needed; don’t “improve” unrelated code.
4. Goal-Driven Execution — Define success criteria and verify (e.g. with tests).

A note on “just markdown”

I find it a bit wild that extensions for your editor can be little more than a markdown file of sixty-odd lines—no runtime, no dependencies—and still resonate enough to get 3,500+ stars on GitHub, like the original Claude Karpathy skills repo. The leverage is in the instructions, not the machinery. This extension is a small step to get that same content one click away in Cursor and VS Code.

Guidelines adapted from forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills (MIT). Repository.