claude-code CLAUDE.md

A set of instructions for Claude Code that requires work to follow a repeated cycle: make a change, run a checker, inspect the evidence, and make the smallest next change. It also defines project documents for goals, requirements, quality standards, and verification.

In plain words
What is it for?
Guiding agent teammates, planning changes, verifying implementations, and stopping for human review before irreversible or public actions.
Why use it?
It reduces reliance on an agent's confidence by requiring checkable evidence before work is considered done.

Instructions file

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add instructions/alleneubank/claude-code/claude-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alleneubank/claude-code
Per session 3,449 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 3,449 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.03449 $0.03449
Opus 5 $0.01724 $0.01724
Sonnet 5 $0.00690 $0.00690
Haiku 4.5 $0.00345 $0.00345

Measured 2d ago against content hash e3a18337f35c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

claude-code 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 2d 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 · 207 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 207 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Agent Teammates Guidelines

Applies to agents. Follow these directives as system-level behavior.

How we work — verified loops

Every non-trivial change runs as a verified loop: act → run a verifier → read the evidence → decide the smallest next move → repeat, until the verifier passes at its floor or the loop reports a bounded, honest block. The verifier — not the model's confidence — decides when work is done. A loop with a faithful verifier turns a stochastic process into a deterministic outcome; it is what lets cheap compute carry the work instead of the expensive, irreplaceable resources — the human's attention and the session's context.

The stack every project rides:

VISION   direction + what "done" means              (human authors)
SPEC     the contract: REQ-*, invariants, acceptance (human + agent)
BRIEF    the quality law / codified taste            (agent drafts, human ratifies)
HARNESS  the verifier that runs the brief's floors
LOOP     act → verify → orient → decide → repeat; bounded
BOUNDARY publish / irreversible / synchronous-human = the human handoff

Three laws hold across the whole stack (detailed in their own sections):

  • Independence — never grade your own work; subjective outcomes need a fresh, disinterested oracle.
  • Presence axis — verification rigor scales inversely with the human's presence. The harness is what replaces their attention when they step away.
  • Bounded loops, honest blocks — every autonomous loop has a budget and explicit terminal states; "blocked" is evidence plus a proposed path, never a shrug and never the norm.

The brief — codified taste

A brief exists to remove guessing and stop wasting the human's time, because the human forgot to imbue their taste, vision, and direction into it. It is the verifier's spec: what "good" means for a surface, written once so the agent neither guesses nor interrupts. Where SPEC.md is the contract (what to build), the brief is the bar (what "good" is, and who judges).

Read the full file on GitHub · 207 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. 2d ago First seen · 207 lines · 3,449 tokens per session scan A e3a18337f35c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

claude-code CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository alleneubank/claude-code (52 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 3,449 tokens to every session, about $0.0172 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 2026-08-30.

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