Andrej Karpathy Skills Cursor Vscode

The pitch is deliberately tiny: four principles in 65 lines of Markdown, the first being "Think Before Coding." That's the whole product. We'd reach for it when you want the shortest possible experiment in steering an AI coding assistant and you already live in VS Code or Cursor. Installing the extension takes a minute, there's no config to maintain, and the rules text is forkable if you want to edit it. Where it bites is proof. The blog author tried a simple refactoring and thought the assistant was "very reluctant in making changes," but couldn't say whether the result was better. Non-determinism makes a one-off test meaningless. We'd suggest running the same task a dozen times with and without the rules before drawing any conclusion. The closest alternative isn't a competing extension — it's the rules system you already have. A standard Cursor rules file describing your environment, coding standards, and architectural constraints gives the model project-specific context this file deliberately lacks. If your problem is "the assistant ignores our conventions," this won't fix it. If your problem is "the assistant rushes into edits," it might nudge things in the right direction. Two practical caveats. The VS Code install shows a warning because the publisher isn't verified — fine for a personal machine, a friction point for anyone distributing extensions across a team. And the Cursor side lives on Open VSX, which the author describes as cumbersome to publish to; that's his problem, not yours, but it tells you the extension is a one-person repackaging rather than a maintained product. We'd treat it as a curiosity with a low floor and an unclear ceiling. Star counts moving from 3.5K to 3.9K in a day say something about attention, not about measured improvement.