diffctx CLAUDE.md

Project instructions for diffctx, a tool that summarizes a file tree or selects the code needed to understand a Git change. Git is a system that records code changes over time.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them when mapping a repository, serializing its files, reviewing a code change, or following the project’s development and performance-testing rules.
Why use it?
Large repositories and diffs can contain more information than a person or AI can review efficiently. These instructions focus on presenting the most relevant context clearly and with fewer distractions.

Instructions file

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/nikolay-e/diffctx/claude-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nikolay-e/diffctx
Per session 1,220 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 1,220 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.01220 $0.01220
Opus 5 $0.00610 $0.00610
Sonnet 5 $0.00244 $0.00244
Haiku 4.5 $0.00122 $0.00122

Measured yesterday against content hash 63ed7d1a7c5e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

diffctx 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 yesterday.

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 · 107 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 107 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

diffctx

Ultimate Goal

Maximize the speed and depth of understanding textual information — for any reader, in any scenario.

Whether the consumer is an LLM processing a context window or a human reviewing a code change, diffctx's job is the same: extract the maximum signal from a codebase and present it in the clearest, most information-dense form possible. The single lens for every trade-off is comprehension-per-token — the ratio of understanding gained to attention spent.


Two Modes of Operation

Tree Mapping Mode (diffctx .) — Filesystem-focused. Walks the directory tree respecting hierarchical ignore patterns, reads file contents with binary/encoding detection, and serializes to YAML/JSON/text/Markdown. Deterministic, side-effect-free.

Diff Context Mode (diffctx . --diff) — Semantics-focused. Analyzes a git diff to intelligently select the minimal set of code fragments needed to understand a change. For the formal theoretical foundation, see the research paper (source in paper/v2/, snapshot at git tag paper-v2).

Development

Setup, test commands, and the per-case YAML-corpus CI gate (crates/diffctx-native/tests/known_below_threshold.txt, bidirectional: a listed case that starts passing also fails) live in CONTRIBUTING.md. Nightly CI reruns the corpus with DIFFCTX_YAML_IGNORE_BASELINE=1, so baseline growth/shrinkage is tracked even when every per-commit verdict passes.

Performance-change discipline (E/Q classes)

Every change is either E-class (bit-equivalent: identical selection output on identical input) or Q-class (output-changing). Q-class changes are frozen during an evaluation cycle (calibration -> validation -> sweep) — they invalidate the calibration and force a full rerun. The shared token corpus, the per-blob token cache, and the two-pass edge cap are all E-class precedents; fragmentation or scoring changes are Q-class.

Read the full file on GitHub · 107 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. yesterday First seen · 107 lines · 1,220 tokens per session scan A 63ed7d1a7c5e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

diffctx CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository nikolay-e/diffctx (3 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 1,220 tokens to every session, about $0.0061 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 2026-08-31.

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