guardrails-skill: Instructions file for Claude Code

CLAUDE.md

guardrails-skill CLAUDE.md is an instructions file for Claude Code from adewale/guardrails-skill. It costs 580 tokens per session, scanned A, original, MIT.

A Claude Code skill that adds quality gates for coding agents. It uses lifecycle checks, reference guidance, and a reproduction-script template; the repository itself has no runnable application or test suite.

In plain words
What is it for?
Guiding agents through repository discovery, configuration checks, testing, diagnostic work, and reproducible bug reports.
Why use it?
It prevents an agent from moving forward until required project checks have passed and provides a consistent way to investigate problems.

Instructions file for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: SessionStart hook event. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code.

This is adewale/guardrails-skill's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on guardrails-skill itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything guardrails-skill configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to adewale/guardrails-skill. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adewale/guardrails-skill/main/CLAUDE.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/adewale/guardrails-skill

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

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README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/adewale/guardrails-skill/claude-md.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/adewale/guardrails-skill/claude-md)
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<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/adewale/guardrails-skill/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/adewale/guardrails-skill/claude-md.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 580 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 580 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00580 $0.00580
Opus 5 $0.00290 $0.00290
Sonnet 5 $0.00116 $0.00116
Haiku 4.5 $0.00058 $0.00058

Measured 7d ago against content hash 3e2fc72ad92a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

guardrails-skill CLAUDE.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

CLAUDE.md · 37 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 37 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

CLAUDE.md

This file provides guidance to Claude Code (claude.ai/code) when working with code in this repository.

What This Is

A Claude Code skill — not a runnable codebase. There is no build system, package manager, test suite, or CI pipeline. The repository contains only markdown documentation and one bash template that together define quality gates for coding agents.

The skill lives in skills/guardrails/. SKILL.md is the core artifact (~220 lines). Everything else supports it:

  • skills/guardrails/references/tool-building.md — diagnostic tool/notation catalog with worked examples (loaded on demand by the circuit breaker)
  • skills/guardrails/references/language-defaults.md — tool selection lookup table by ecosystem (JS/TS, Python, Rust, Go, Java)
  • skills/guardrails/assets/notation-templates/reproduction-script.sh — bash scaffold for repro scripts

The repo is also a Claude Code plugin (.claude-plugin/plugin.json and marketplace.json).

Architecture

The skill defines lifecycle hooks that block agent progress until checks pass:

Hook Fires when What runs
SessionStart Agent boots Discovery: git baseline, config inspection, test conventions, LESSONS_LEARNED.md, agent-tools/
Stop Agent returns control Fast check (format, lint, types, unit tests). Circuit breaker after 2 failures
Commit Any git commit Full suite + secrets scan + integration/deployment check (is new code reachable?)

The circuit breaker is the key enforcement mechanism: after 2 failed fix attempts, the agent must build a diagnostic tool or switch to a structured notation (from references/tool-building.md) rather than retrying. After attempt 3, the agent stops entirely and reports to the user.

Config protection prevents the agent from weakening its own guardrails (test scripts, lint config, CI definitions, coverage thresholds).

Editing Guidelines

  • SKILL.md must stay under ~250 lines. It's read by agents at session start; bloat wastes context tokens.
  • The skill defines when checks run and what to do when stuck, not how to lint or test — agents already know that from training.
  • References are loaded on demand, not eagerly. Keep this separation: SKILL.md for hooks/rules, references/ for catalogs.
  • The reproduction-script.sh template follows a 4-phase pattern (Setup → Trigger → Check → Cleanup) with set -euo pipefail. Preserve this structure.
  • The language-defaults.md table covers 5 ecosystems × 4 concern areas (testing, static analysis, security, infrastructure). Add new ecosystems as new columns, new concerns as new rows.

Read the full file on GitHub · 37 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 37 lines · 580 tokens per session scan A 3e2fc72ad92a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

guardrails-skill CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository adewale/guardrails-skill (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 580 tokens to every session, about $0.0029 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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