promode: Instructions file for Claude Code

CLAUDE.md

promode CLAUDE.md is an instructions file for Claude Code from mikekelly/promode. It costs 2,119 tokens per session, scanned A, original, MIT.

Project instructions for Promode, a Claude Code plugin that applies fixed preferences to project planning, coding, testing, reviews, and knowledge management. TDD means writing tests before or alongside the code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them when maintaining Promode, its agents and commands, its documentation, or its test-driven development and handoff workflows.
Why use it?
They keep the plugin's methodology, commands, documentation, and operating rules consistent as the project changes.

Instructions file for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} variable. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

This is mikekelly/promode's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on promode 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 promode configures →

Runs only inside a plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else, and the catalogue could not identify which plugin ships it.

Reuse

Borrowing it

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

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.

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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.

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Per session 2,119 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 2,119 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 $0.02119 $0.02119
Opus 5.5 $0.00848 $0.00848
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00424 $0.00424
Haiku 4.5 $0.00212 $0.00212

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 82e267a336f9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

promode 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 · 50 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 50 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Keep this file under 50 lines. This is a plugin repository - see plugins/promode/ for the actual plugin.

What is Promode?

Promode is a Claude Code plugin whose main goal is to make Claude Code operate in an opinionated way that drives projects in the direction of its owner's preferences — spanning how the harness's features are used, product and engineering methodology, and knowledge/memory management. It ships:

  • Agents — phase-specific subagents for hard-to-reverse design, implementation, review, debugging, verification/QA, environment management, product design, after-action analysis, methodology audit, and constraint reinforcement
  • Commands — user-typed flows (/promode:handoff, /promode:promode-audit); cross-cutting mechanics live in routed docs (plugins/promode/docs/) reached by def-directed reads. No skills, by design — voluntary invocation is non-determinate: docs/decisions/2026-07-skills-elimination.md

Core philosophy: TDD is non-negotiable, tests are the documentation, context is precious, discovery hardens into deterministic tests/scripts/maps, and the main agent orchestrates — and enforces the opinions — while subagents execute, instilled with the same opinions. Promode is intended to be forked per user — methodology is taste, this repo is the mikekelly fork — and the opinion register (imported below) is the single evolvable home of the owner's preferences and a fork's customisation surface: opinions evolve gradually, and changing one there then syncing its homes is what drives the change in the prompting and tools that carry it — the fork stays coherently yours.

Overriding design goal — optimise for the current harness. Promode's techniques target the latest Claude Code features/behaviour, and silently decay as the harness evolves. Two verification resources: the community-tracked Claude Code changelog for what changed release-to-release, and the harness you are running in (when you're a Claude Code agent working on this repo) — probe it live to verify undocumented behaviour and edge cases (how SendMessage steer/resume and hook chunking were pinned down) before building a technique on an assumption.

Read the full file on GitHub · 50 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. 2mo ago First seen · 50 lines · 2,119 tokens per session scan A 82e267a336f9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

promode CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository mikekelly/promode (21 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 2,119 tokens to every session, about $0.0085 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 2026-08-30.

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