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Coding Discipline Skills

4 rules that force Claude to think before coding, keep it simple, make surgical changes, and define success first.

Development / Disciplinedevelopmentdiscipline
by AgentVoltv1.0.0Published 1y ago
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Before & after

Same prompt, same agent — the only difference is the skill.

Prompt“Refactor our authentication layer from basic sessions to JWTs.”
Beforegeneric AI agent
Okay, so you need to move to JWTs. That makes sense. JWTs are pretty popular for modern auth systems. I think the approach would be to create new JWT-issuing endpoints, update your middleware to accept tokens, handle the payload parsing, add refresh-token logic, maybe set up expiration. You'd probably want to update your frontend to store tokens in localStorage or sessionStorage. There are also security considerations—you'll want HTTPS, secure cookies for refresh tokens, that kind of thing. I could help you think through the whole flow. Do you have any existing token infrastructure? What framework are you using?
Afterwith Coding Discipline Skills
PHASE ZERO: DEFINE SUCCESS BEFORE TOUCHING CODE
✓ What will 'done' look like? Token strategy accepted by security review. Client/server tests passing. Legacy sessions coexisting 2 weeks. Rollback plan documented.
✓ What will break? Old mobile clients, server-side session validation, existing middleware assumptions.
✓ Simplest path? Dual-auth (accept both JWT and session) during transition. No parallel infrastructure. No refresh-token dance until v2.

PHASE ONE: SURGICAL SCOPE
→ Commit: JWT issue endpoint + middleware validation. DO NOT touch: password reset, 2FA, role checks yet. Those stay in session.
→ Change only: auth.ts (add JWT issuer), middleware.ts (add JWT parser), 2 test files.
→ Avoid trap: shaving the entire auth yak. Keep sessions working.

PHASE TWO: TEST THEN PATCH
→ Reproduce: POST /auth/token with valid creds → expect JWT. Parse token in middleware.
→ Isolate: Does payload round-trip? Is exp honored? Does malformed token reject cleanly?
→ Hypothesis: Legacy refresh-token expiry logic will collide (delete it in phase 2).
→ Patch only: the identified collision. Nothing more.

About this skill

name: karpathy-skills description: Use when Based on a renowned AI researcher's Claude complaints — 4 rules that force Claude to think before coding, keep it simple, make surgical changes, and define success first.

Coding Discipline Skills

Based on a widely-shared thread by a renowned AI researcher about Claude's failure modes. The four rules: think before coding, keep it simple, make surgical changes only, define success before touching anything. Currently the fastest-growing single-file repo of 2026 with 160,000 GitHub stars. Slows Claude down and forces more disciplined, precise work.

What you get

  • Four enforced behavioral rules, pre-coding thinking requirement, simplicity enforcement, surgical-changes-only discipline, success criteria defined before any action.

Customize your output

  • Adjust how strictly each of the four rules is enforced. Combine with Superpowers for maximum development discipline.

Example output

the original author Skills intercepted Claude: success criteria defined first, simplest approach selected, only the targeted 2 files modified — no scope creep.

Best for

Developers frustrated with Claude's overconfidence and overengineering, anyone who wants more precise and disciplined AI behavior.

SKILL.md preview

SKILL.md
---
name: karpathy-skills
description: Use this skill to enforce four coding discipline rules: think first, keep it simple, make surgical changes, and define success before touching code.
version: 1.0.0
category: Development / Discipline
author: AgentVolt
license: proprietary
tags:
  - development
  - discipline
  - standard
---

# Coding Discipline Skills

Applies four discipline rules before and during any coding task, slowing the first move so the resulting change is precise rather than a guess that happened to compile.

## When to use

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