CLAUDE-md-12-rule-template

CLAUDE.md — 12-rule template

• Karpathy's 4 prevent the failure modes he saw in January 2026: silent assumptions, over-engineering, orthogonal damage, weak success criteria. They're foundational. Don't skip them. The 8 rules added prevent failure modes that emerged in May 2026: agent loops without budgets, multi-step tasks without checkpoints, tests that don't test, silent successes hiding silent failures. They're additive.

• Your mileage will vary. If you don't run multi-step pipelines, Rule 10 doesn't matter. If your codebase has one consistent style enforced by linting, Rule 11 is redundant. Read the 12, keep the ones that map to mistakes you've actually made, drop the rest.

• A 6-rule CLAUDE.md tuned to your real failure modes beats a 12-rule one with 6 rules you'll never need.