karpathy-guidelines

To prevent LLM coding mistakes during refactoring, apply behavioral guidelines that enforce explicit thinking, surgical edits, and verifiable success criteria to ensure safe, minimal changes.

Best guidelines for LLM code review emphasize surfacing hidden assumptions, preferring minimal deterministic changes over speculative rewrites, and defining goal-driven success criteria to verify outcomes.

LLMs make overcomplicated code changes due to hidden assumptions and speculative rewrites; you fix it by enforcing simplicity first, touching only necessary code, and requiring explicit thinking before acting.

Yes, you can use these coding guidelines for incremental refactors to keep projects maintainable under evolving requirements by producing minimal, verifiable sets of changes that improve clarity and safety.

Applying surgical edit guidelines works with existing development workflows by integrating into coding, review, and tutoring sessions without requiring dependencies, keeping surrounding code intact during minimal changes.

You should be cautious using an LLM for code refactoring when a task lacks verifiable success criteria or explicit assumptions, as the guidelines require deterministic outcomes to ensure safe, minimal changes.