What is Homunculus CLAUDE.md?

A development guide for Homunculus, a Node.js and Claude CLI project with scripts, commands, templates, and documentation.

Use it when changing or releasing Homunculus to follow its project structure and release checklist, including versioning, publishing, and documentation updates.

It prevents releases from missing required updates across code, documentation, translations, version numbers, packages, and GitHub releases.

Homunculus CLAUDE.md — Instructions file for coding agents by JavanC: A development guide for Homunculus, a Node.js and Claude…

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/javanc/homunculus/claude-md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JavanC/Homunculus

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/javanc/homunculus/claude-md.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/javanc/homunculus/claude-md)

Your own site

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

Per session 361 This file is loaded in full into every session.

When invoked 361 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00361	$0.00361
Opus 5	$0.00180	$0.00180
Sonnet 5	$0.00072	$0.00072
Haiku 4.5	$0.00036	$0.00036

Measured 5d ago against content hash 3d9f4218400e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Homunculus 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 5d 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 · 31 lines

What it actually says

Homunculus — Development Guide

Release Checklist

Every change to this repo must complete these steps in order:

Code changes — implement the feature/fix
README.md — update What's New section + any affected docs
i18n sync — update docs/zh-TW/README.md and docs/zh-CN/README.md to match
package.json — bump version (semver: patch/minor/major)
git commit + push — descriptive commit message
npm publish — npm publish from repo root
GitHub release — gh release create vX.Y.Z with release notes
assistant plan.md — sync ~/assistant/projects/homunculus/plan.md if applicable

Project Structure

bin/ — CLI entry points (init, upgrade, night)
core/ — Evolution scripts copied to user projects during init
commands/ — Slash commands copied to .claude/commands/ during init
templates/ — CLAUDE.md, architecture.yaml, rules templates for init
docs/ — Long-form documentation
examples/reference/ — Real-world reference implementation from the author's system

Key Design Decisions

Zero dependencies — Only Node.js stdlib + Claude CLI
File copy, not symlink — init copies files so users can customize freely
Manifest-based upgrade — .manifest.json tracks SHA256 hashes for diff-aware upgrades
Never touch user content — upgrade never modifies CLAUDE.md, architecture.yaml, instincts, skills

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.

5d ago First seen · 31 lines · 361 tokens per session scan A 3d9f4218400e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Homunculus CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository JavanC/Homunculus (15 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 361 tokens to every session, about $0.0018 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.

codex AGENTS.md

AGENTS.md instructions for openai/codex, covering rust/codex-rs, the codex-core crate, code review rules, crate api surface and model visible context.

openai/codex · 5,182 tokens

vscode buildNext.instructions.md

Working notes and architecture documentation for the new esbuild-based build system in build/next. Use when making changes to the new build pipeline (transpile/bundle commands, NLS plugin, source-map handling, resource copying, or self-hosting watch tasks).

microsoft/vscode · 6,785 tokens

Homunculus CLAUDE.md