What is Citadel CLAUDE.md?

Instructions for Claude Harness, a system that coordinates coding agents, reusable skills, automated checks, and work that continues across sessions. A harness is the surrounding system that manages how an agent performs tasks.

Use them when developing or maintaining the harness, its task-routing commands, parallel agents, project setup hooks, campaign tracking, or quality checks.

They explain where the system's skills, agents, hooks, and saved campaign state live so developers can work on the right part.

How SethGammon/Citadel configures Claude Code

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to SethGammon/Citadel. 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/SethGammon/Citadel/main/CLAUDE.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/SethGammon/Citadel

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/sethgammon/citadel/claude-md/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/sethgammon/citadel/claude-md)

Your own site

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

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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/sethgammon/citadel/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/sethgammon/citadel/claude-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 860 This file is loaded in full into every session.

When invoked 860 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00860	$0.00860
Opus 5.5	$0.00344	$0.00344
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00172	$0.00172
Haiku 4.5	$0.00086	$0.00086

Measured 1mo ago against content hash d2a1ad3766ce, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Citadel 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 1mo 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 · 71 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 71 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Claude Harness

An agent orchestration system for Claude Code. This repo IS the harness.

What This Is

The harness is a collection of skills, agents, hooks, and state files that enable Claude Code to operate autonomously on any codebase. It provides:

Intent routing (/do) that dispatches tasks to the right tool
Campaign persistence across sessions
Parallel agent coordination with discovery sharing
Automated quality enforcement through lifecycle hooks

Key Conventions

Skills live in skills/. Each skill is a directory skills/{name}/SKILL.md.
Agents live in agents/. They spawn as sub-processes with their own context.
Hooks live in hooks_src/. Installed per-project via scripts/install-hooks.js.
The init-project hook auto-scaffolds per-project state on session start:
- .planning/ — campaign state, fleet sessions, intake, telemetry
- .citadel/scripts/ — utility scripts (telemetry, coordination, compression)
- .claude/agent-context/ — rules injected into sub-agents
Campaign state lives in .planning/campaigns/ (per-project).
Fleet session state lives in .planning/fleet/ (per-project).
Templates live in .planning/_templates/ (copied from plugin on init).
Configuration lives in .claude/harness.json (generated by /do setup, per-project).

Testing

Always run tests after modifying hooks or skills. Five levels:

Command	What it checks	When to run
`node scripts/test-all.js`	Hooks + skill structure (fast, no LLM)	After any change
`node hooks_src/smoke-test.js`	Hooks only	After hook changes
`node scripts/verify-hooks.js`	Hook install + runtime (synthetic payloads, no LLM)	After hook changes
`node scripts/integration-test.js`	Full Pre→tool→Post pipeline sequences (no LLM)	After hook changes
`node scripts/skill-lint.js`	All SKILL.md structure	After skill changes
`node scripts/skill-bench.js`	Scenario file validity	After adding benchmarks
`node scripts/skill-bench.js --execute`	Live scenario execution	Before shipping
`node scripts/skill-bench.js --execute --verify-hooks`	Live execution + confirms hooks fired	Before shipping

Read the full file on GitHub · 71 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.

1mo ago Changed · +2 lines · +54 tokens per session d2a1ad3766ce
2mo ago First seen · 69 lines · 806 tokens per session scan A 6b18765b648d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Citadel CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository SethGammon/Citadel (927 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 860 tokens to every session, about $0.0034 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.

agent-orchestration agent-workflow ai-agents claude-code-plugin claude-plugins codex-plugin

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Citadel: Instructions file for Claude Code