mcp-steroid: Instructions file for Claude Code

CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md

Guidance for Claude Code when working with this repository. Instructions here override default behavior.

Design philosophy

Three tenets govern every change in this repo — to code, MCP tools, or prompts. Read docs/PHILOSOPHY.md (mirrored as mcp-steroid://skill/design-philosophy for runtime fetch via steroid_fetch_resource) before proposing any of:

• a new steroid_* MCP tool
• a new method on McpScriptContext
• a "helper" that wraps an IntelliJ API

Short version: the MCP tool surface (8 today) stays narrow on purpose; the IntelliJ capability surface stays full, exposed via steroid_execute_code plus prompt resources. The strategy page's "Give AI the whole IDE, not just the files" is delivered through that combination — steroid_execute_code reaches every IDE API, and the mcp-steroid:// prompt corpus teaches the agent how. New tools and new context methods are not the lever.

Recursive context lookup (do this before sub-folder work)

Before acting on any task that touches files in a sub-folder, walk the directory tree from the changed file's folder up to the project root and read every CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md you find on the way (including this one). Sub-folder guides take precedence over the root for their own scope; the root only holds project-wide rules.

Recipe (run this in your head, or with a one-liner). Normalize the starting directory to an absolute path first — relative paths converge on . and never match the repo root, infinite-looping:

# from any file path (relative or absolute), walk parents to repo root, collecting CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md
file="<changed-file>"
dir=$(cd "$(dirname "$file")" && pwd)
root=$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)
while [ "$dir" != "$root" ] && [ "$dir" != "/" ]; do
  for f in CLAUDE.md AGENTS.md; do [ -f "$dir/$f" ] && echo "$dir/$f"; done
  dir=$(dirname "$dir")
done
for f in CLAUDE.md AGENTS.md; do [ -f "$root/$f" ] && echo "$root/$f"; done