Karpathy agent skills degrade coding performance

Blindly copying viral prompt templates without empirical verification is cargo-cult engineering that harms agent capabilities.

• –The "simplicity first, surgical only" constraint forces agents to write naive workarounds for complex dependencies instead of solving tasks cleanly.
• –Empirical test pass rates dropped consistently across all difficulty tiers when using these guidelines.
• –The instructions result in a 5% increase in token costs due to verbose or inefficient agent reasoning.
• –The repository is falsely attributed to Andrej Karpathy to drive adoption.