karpathy-review

Review the provided code, plan, or spec against Karpathy's four principles. Credit: guidelines distilled from Andrej Karpathy's January 2026 observations, adapted by Forrest Chang.

Ask the user: "Paste the code, plan, or spec you want reviewed."

Then score it against each principle:

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Karpathy Review

1. Think Before Coding — were assumptions stated?

• Did the solution state its assumptions explicitly, or pick silently between interpretations?
• Are there any unclear requirements that should have triggered a clarifying question?
• Finding: PASS / FLAG — [specific observation]

2. Simplicity First — is this the minimal solution?

• Does it add features beyond what was asked?
• Are there abstractions written for single-use code?
• Is there "flexibility" or "configurability" that wasn't requested?
• Could this be meaningfully shorter?
• Finding: PASS / FLAG — [specific observation, e.g. "This 180-line class could be a 20-line function"]

3. Surgical Changes — does it stay in its lane?

• Does it modify adjacent code, formatting, or comments that weren't part of the task?
• Does it refactor things that weren't broken?
• Does it delete pre-existing code that wasn't asked to be removed?
• Finding: PASS / FLAG — [specific observation]

4. Goal-Driven Execution — is success verifiable?

• Is there a clear success criterion?
• For multi-step work: was a plan stated with checkpoints?
• Is there a way to verify the output without running it?
• Finding: PASS / FLAG — [specific observation]

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Verdict

Principle	Result
Think before coding	✅ PASS / ⚠️ FLAG
Simplicity first	✅ PASS / ⚠️ FLAG
Surgical changes	✅ PASS / ⚠️ FLAG
Goal-driven execution	✅ PASS / ⚠️ FLAG

One thing to fix: [If any flags, name the single most important change to make]