ralphctl-surgical-simplicitylisted

# Surgical Simplicity > Distilled from Andrej Karpathy's public guidance on LLM coding — his January 2026 X post on coding > pitfalls and the "Software Is Changing" / Software 3.0 talk. Clean-room — concepts only, not copied text. The two failure modes that make AI-generated diffs hard to review are opposite in feel but identical in cost: writing too much (speculative code that nobody asked for) and touching too much (sweeping the surrounding file while fixing one function). Both inflate the diff, blur the intent, and make the post-task gate verdict harder to trust. The antidote is equally simple in each case — write the minimum, and stop at the boundary the task drew. ## When this applies - **Execute** — every generator turn that produces, edits, or reorganises code. Both halves below apply to every change, large or small. ## What to do ### Simplicity first 1. **Write the minimum code the task needs.** If the task asks for a function, write the function — not the interface, the registry, the factory, and the config flag that "might be useful later". Speculative additions are never reviewed and rarely removed. 2. **Prefer straightforward over clever.** A hundred readable lines beats fifty lines of indirection that save nothing at runtime. Readability is not a style preference; it is the cost of the next change. 3. **Resist adding configuration the task did not request.** A new boolean flag "for flexibility" is a permanent branch in every future call path.