Circus-Chief: Instructions file for Claude Code

CLAUDE.md

Circus-Chief CLAUDE.md is an instructions file for Claude Code from ferrislucas/Circus-Chief. It costs 2,092 tokens per session, scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

Project guidance for Circus Chief, a local-first web app for managing AI coding-agent sessions and sharing images, documents, and data on a visual canvas.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when developing or testing Circus Chief, including its server, web interface, authentication flows, and agent-session features.
Why use it?
It records how to start the frontend and backend, run unit tests, and run or debug browser end-to-end tests across the app's packages.

Instructions file for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: the file is CLAUDE.md. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

This is ferrislucas/Circus-Chief's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on Circus-Chief 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 Circus-Chief configures →

Not installable: its command points at a path on the author’s own machine, so it runs nowhere else. The line is /home/ubuntu/workspace/circus-chief.

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to ferrislucas/Circus-Chief. 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/ferrislucas/Circus-Chief/main/CLAUDE.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ferrislucas/Circus-Chief

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

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README.md
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Per session 2,092 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 2,092 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 $0.02092 $0.02092
Opus 5 $0.01046 $0.01046
Sonnet 5 $0.00418 $0.00418
Haiku 4.5 $0.00209 $0.00209

Measured 7d ago against content hash 8f84c5bd7609, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Circus-Chief 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 · 208 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 208 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.

Project Overview

Circus Chief is a local-first web application for managing AI coding agent sessions with a visual canvas for artifacts. It supports Claude Code agents (via Anthropic API, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, z.ai, or any Anthropic-compatible endpoint), OpenAI Codex agents, and Google Gemini CLI agents. Users can view/manage sessions, share a visual canvas (images, documents, data), and interact with active coding sessions from a web browser.

Common Commands

# Development - start both frontend and backend
yarn dev

# Run all unit tests
yarn test

# Run tests for a specific package
yarn workspace @circuschief/server test
yarn workspace @circuschief/web test

# Run a single test file (vitest)
yarn workspace @circuschief/server test src/db/SessionRepository.test.js
yarn workspace @circuschief/web test src/stores/ui.test.js

# E2E tests with Playwright
./scripts/pw.sh test                           # Run all E2E tests
./scripts/pw.sh test --grep="login"            # Filter by test name
./scripts/pw.sh debug tests/e2e/auth.spec.ts   # Debug mode (headed)

# Linting
yarn lint

# Build for production
yarn build

Architecture

Monorepo Structure (Yarn Workspaces)

  • packages/server - Express backend with WebSocket support
  • packages/web - Vue.js 3 frontend (Vite, Pinia, Vue Router)
  • packages/shared - Shared types, constants, and Zod contracts

Server Package (@circuschief/server)

  • src/index.js - Entry point, starts HTTP server
  • src/app.js - Express app configuration
  • src/websocket.js - WebSocket server setup
  • src/api/ - REST API routes (projects, sessions, canvas, git, providers)
  • src/agents/ - Agent adapter pattern for multi-backend support
    • AgentGateway.js - Factory/registry for agent adapters
    • BaseAgent.js - Abstract base class for agent adapters
    • adapters/ClaudeCodeAdapter.js - Claude Code agent (Anthropic)
    • adapters/CodexAdapter.js - OpenAI Codex agent (OpenAI)
    • adapters/GeminiAdapter.js - Google Gemini CLI agent (Google)
    • adapters/cliUtils.js - Shared CLI utilities (prompt composition) used by Codex and Gemini adapters
  • src/db/ - SQLite repositories using better-sqlite3
    • BaseRepository.js - Abstract base with CRUD operations
    • Repository pattern: ProjectRepository, SessionRepository, MessageRepository, CanvasItemRepository, SessionNoteRepository
  • src/services/ - Business logic (sessionManager, canvasStore, gitService, diffService)
  • src/ws/ - WebSocket manager for real-time updates

Read the full file on GitHub · 208 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 · 208 lines · 2,092 tokens per session scan A 8f84c5bd7609

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Circus-Chief CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository ferrislucas/Circus-Chief (12 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 2,092 tokens to every session, about $0.0105 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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