One developer named forrest chang reads the post the next day, identifies the four failure modes karpathy named and converts them into a single CLAUDE(.md ) file. Drops it on github on 27 jan. 220,000 combined stars later, its one of the fastest-growing repos in GitHub history. the problem it actually solves is that claude code starts every session cold with no memory of your stack, your past decisions, what you ruled out last week or why you chose one approach over another and so it guesses and refactors things that were not broken. Karpathy described it precisely that models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and barrel ahead without checking. They dont manage their own confusion, ask for clarification, surface inconsistencies or push back when they should. CLAUDE. md is a plain text file claude code reads at the start of every session. Four rules inside it being Ask, dont assume. If something’s unclear, ask before writing a line and no silent guesses about intent, architecture, or requirements. Simplest solution first and implement the minimum thing that works. No abstractions you didn’t request. Dont touch unrelated code and if a file isnt part of the current task, leave it. Flag uncertainty explicitly or if you’re not confident, say so before proceeding as confidence without certainty causes more damage than admitting a gap. That’s the whole file with like seventy lines I have been using it on a project that integrates with Magichour’s and klings api coz video generation pipelines get messy fast, lots of stateful logic and easy for claude to go rogue and start helpfully refactoring things mid session and the reason 220k developers starred this because every developer who has used claude code for more than a week has been burned by exactly these failure modes and had been patching them manually, one frustrated session at a time. While everyone’s debating which model to switch to next, the actual edge is in how precisely you instruct the one already in front of you. Have you tried it? curious what failure modes you r still hitting that the four rules dont cover. submitted by /u/soldierlanderr
Originally posted by u/soldierlanderr on r/ClaudeCode