What is stepwise-dev CLAUDE.md?

Instructions for a Claude Code workflow project that organizes development into research, planning, implementation, and validation. It includes reusable skills, specialized agents, shell scripts, and a local thoughts/ directory for persistent notes.

Researching a codebase, creating and updating plans, implementing and validating changes, managing project thoughts, reviewing pull-request comments, and applying test-driven development (TDD), where tests guide the implementation.

It gives Claude Code a repeatable process for working on software instead of treating every task as an unstructured coding session. The repository is split into separate plugins so workflow, Git, and related tools can be maintained independently.

stepwise-dev CLAUDE.md — Instructions file by nikeyes

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/nikeyes/stepwise-dev/claude-md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nikeyes/stepwise-dev

Per session 2,245 This file is loaded in full into every session.

When invoked 2,245 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	$0.02245	$0.02245
Opus 5	$0.01123	$0.01123
Sonnet 5	$0.00449	$0.00449
Haiku 4.5	$0.00225	$0.00225

Measured 2d ago against content hash c350c78b3857, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

stepwise-dev 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 2d 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 · 264 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 264 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.

Repository Overview

This is a workflow tooling project for Claude Code itself, not a traditional software application. It provides skills, specialized agents, and bash scripts that implement a structured Research → Plan → Implement → Validate development cycle.

The workflow operates entirely locally without cloud dependencies and uses a thoughts/ directory system for persistent storage.

Multi-Plugin Architecture

This project is distributed as 4 independent Claude Code plugins in a single marketplace:

Plugin 1: stepwise-core

Location: core/ Components:

11 skills (research-codebase, create-plan, iterate-plan, implement-plan, validate-plan, thoughts-management, bugmagnet, grill-me, tdd, hamburger-method, small-safe-steps, story-splitting, test-desiderata)
5 specialized agents (codebase-locator, codebase-analyzer, codebase-pattern-finder, thoughts-locator, thoughts-analyzer)

Plugin 2: stepwise-git

Location: git/ Components:

2 skills (commit, review-pr-comments)

Plugin 3: stepwise-web

Location: web/ Components:

1 specialized agent (web-search-researcher)

Plugin 4: stepwise-research

Location: research/ Components:

1 skill (deep-research, includes generate-report script)
3 specialized agents (research-lead, research-worker, citation-analyst)

Installation:

# Add marketplace
claude plugin marketplace add [email protected]:nikeyes/stepwise-dev.git

# Install all (or pick individual ones)
claude plugin install stepwise-core@stepwise-dev
claude plugin install stepwise-git@stepwise-dev
claude plugin install stepwise-web@stepwise-dev
claude plugin install stepwise-research@stepwise-dev

See README.md for detailed installation instructions.

Project Structure

.claude-plugin/        # Marketplace configuration
└── marketplace.json   # Marketplace listing all 4 plugins

core/                  # stepwise-core plugin
├── .claude-plugin/
│   └── plugin.json
├── agents/            # 5 specialized agents (markdown files)
│   ├── codebase-locator.md
│   ├── codebase-analyzer.md
│   ├── codebase-pattern-finder.md
│   ├── thoughts-locator.md
│   └── thoughts-analyzer.md
└── skills/            # 11 skills (SKILL.md directories)
    ├── create-plan/SKILL.md
    ├── iterate-plan/SKILL.md
    ├── implement-plan/SKILL.md
    ├── validate-plan/SKILL.md
    ├── research-codebase/SKILL.md
    ├── thoughts-management/
    │   ├── SKILL.md
    │   └── scripts/
    │       ├── thoughts-init
    │       └── thoughts-metadata
    ├── bugmagnet/SKILL.md
    ├── hamburger-method/SKILL.md
    ├── small-safe-steps/SKILL.md
    ├── story-splitting/SKILL.md
    └── test-desiderata/SKILL.md

git/                   # stepwise-git plugin
├── .claude-plugin/
│   └── plugin.json
└── skills/            # 2 skills
    ├── commit/SKILL.md
    └── review-pr-comments/SKILL.md

web/                   # stepwise-web plugin
├── .claude-plugin/
│   └── plugin.json
└── agents/            # 1 specialized agent
    └── web-search-researcher.md

research/              # stepwise-research plugin
├── .claude-plugin/
│   └── plugin.json
├── agents/            # 3 specialized agents
│   ├── research-lead.md
│   ├── research-worker.md
│   └── citation-analyst.md
└── skills/            # 1 skill
    └── deep-research/
        ├── SKILL.md
        └── scripts/
            └── generate-report

test/                  # Automated bash tests (for development)

Read the full file on GitHub · 264 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.

2d ago First seen · 264 lines · 2,245 tokens per session scan A c350c78b3857

Subscribe to this mod's changes

stepwise-dev CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository nikeyes/stepwise-dev (24 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 2,245 tokens to every session, about $0.0112 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.

Building agents Planning

stepwise-dev CLAUDE.md

Getting it into your agent

What it costs to keep this loaded

Grade A, and why

Nothing flagged

How it starts

CLAUDE.md

Repository Overview

Multi-Plugin Architecture

Plugin 1: stepwise-core

Plugin 2: stepwise-git

Plugin 3: stepwise-web

Plugin 4: stepwise-research

Project Structure

What this file has done since we first saw it

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