What is notes CLAUDE.md?

A set of development instructions for the cardmagic/notes project, a tool that searches and manages Apple Notes from the command line or through MCP. It documents the project's commands, structure, and data flow.

Use it when developing the notes project, including running its checks, understanding its CLI and MCP entry points, or working on AppleScript, indexing, search, and formatting code.

It gives Claude Code the project-specific guidance needed to build, test, lint, and change the repository consistently.

How cardmagic/notes configures Claude Code

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to cardmagic/notes. 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/cardmagic/notes/main/CLAUDE.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cardmagic/notes

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/cardmagic/notes/claude-md/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/cardmagic/notes/claude-md)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/cardmagic/notes/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/cardmagic/notes/claude-md/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/cardmagic/notes/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/cardmagic/notes/claude-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 747 This file is loaded in full into every session.

When invoked 747 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00747	$0.00747
Opus 5.5	$0.00299	$0.00299
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00149	$0.00149
Haiku 4.5	$0.00075	$0.00075

Measured 2mo ago against content hash d314348e5ad7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

notes 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 2mo 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 · 82 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 82 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.

Commands

pnpm build          # Compile TypeScript to dist/
pnpm dev            # Watch mode for development
pnpm typecheck      # Type check without emitting
pnpm lint           # Run oxlint
pnpm test           # Run tests
pnpm test:watch     # Run tests in watch mode

make install        # Build and link globally
make clean          # Remove dist/ and node_modules/

Architecture

Dual-mode CLI/MCP tool for searching and managing Apple Notes:

src/
├── index.ts       # Entry point - routes to CLI or MCP mode based on --mcp flag
├── cli.ts         # Commander-based CLI (search, recent, folders, read, create, delete commands)
├── mcp.ts         # MCP server exposing tools via @modelcontextprotocol/sdk
├── applescript.ts # AppleScript automation for create/delete operations
├── indexer.ts     # Builds search indexes from Apple Notes database
├── searcher.ts    # Queries indexes with fuzzy matching via MiniSearch
├── formatter.ts   # Terminal output formatting with chalk
└── types.ts       # Shared types and Apple date conversion utilities

Data flow:

indexer.ts reads Apple's NoteStore.sqlite database from ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes/
Extracts text from gzipped note body data (protobuf-like format)
Creates two indexes in ~/.notes/: FTS5 SQLite for exact search, MiniSearch JSON for fuzzy matching
searcher.ts queries MiniSearch for fuzzy results, then fetches full data from SQLite

Key dependencies:

better-sqlite3: Read Apple Notes DB and create FTS5 index
minisearch: Fuzzy search with typo tolerance
@modelcontextprotocol/sdk: MCP server for Claude Code integration

Claude Code Plugin

This repo is also a Claude Code plugin with skills and slash commands:

.claude-plugin/
├── plugin.json       # Plugin manifest
└── marketplace.json  # Marketplace definition (name: cardmagic)

skills/notes/SKILL.md    # Auto-invoked skill for note queries
commands/
├── search.md            # /notes:search slash command
├── recent.md            # /notes:recent slash command
├── folders.md           # /notes:folders slash command
├── folder.md            # /notes:folder slash command
├── read.md              # /notes:read slash command
├── create.md            # /notes:create slash command
└── delete.md            # /notes:delete slash command

Read the full file on GitHub · 82 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.

2mo ago First seen · 82 lines · 747 tokens per session scan A d314348e5ad7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

notes CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository cardmagic/notes (7 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 747 tokens to every session, about $0.0030 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.

notes CLAUDE.md next to 6 instructions from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
notes CLAUDE.mdcardmagic/notes	Instructions file	7	1mo ago	MIT	A	747	Claude Code
vscode buildNext.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	9,719	GitHub Copilot
next.js AGENTS.mdvercel/next.js	Instructions file	143k	yesterday	MIT	A	7,461	Codex, OpenCode
langchain AGENTS.mdlangchain-ai/langchain	Instructions file	149k	yesterday	MIT	A	4,680	Codex, OpenCode
vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	5,516	GitHub Copilot
vscode copilot-instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	3,093	GitHub Copilot
deepseek-harness AGENTS.mddeepseek-ai/deepseek-harness	Instructions file	274k	2d ago	MIT	A	4,313	Codex, OpenCode

notes: Instructions file for Claude Code