mad-skills: Instructions file for Claude Code

CLAUDE.md

mad-skills CLAUDE.md is an instructions file for Claude Code from slamb2k/mad-skills. It costs 4,786 tokens per session, scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of instructions for using MAD Skills, a collection of 14 development skills for work such as project setup, infrastructure, CI, containers, and code governance. It also explains how MAD Skills fits with the Superpowers development workflow.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when applying MAD Skills to development work, especially planning, building, reviewing, securing, and operating projects across GitHub or Azure DevOps.
Why use it?
It helps an agent choose the right skill and follow the expected order during development. It reduces confusion when both MAD Skills and Superpowers are available.

Instructions file for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: SessionStart hook event. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents.

This is slamb2k/mad-skills's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on mad-skills 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 mad-skills configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to slamb2k/mad-skills. 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/slamb2k/mad-skills/main/CLAUDE.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/slamb2k/mad-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

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Per session 4,786 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 4,786 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 $0.04786 $0.04786
Opus 5 $0.02393 $0.02393
Sonnet 5 $0.00957 $0.00957
Haiku 4.5 $0.00479 $0.00479

Measured 3d ago against content hash 75b281c47864, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

mad-skills 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 3d 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 · 402 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 402 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

CLAUDE.md

Skill Usage Guide

MAD Skills provides 14 skills covering the full development lifecycle. When this plugin is installed, use these skills proactively — don't wait for the user to invoke them by name if the situation clearly calls for one.

Positioning: Complementary to Superpowers

MAD Skills is the deterministic ops/infra spine — scaffolding, tooling, CI, IaC, container pipelines, ambient governance (session-guard), and dual-platform (GitHub + Azure DevOps) support. Superpowers has no equivalent for that layer, and MAD Skills is designed to compose underneath Superpowers' methodology rather than compete with it.

Where the two overlap on methodology (plan → build → finish), MAD Skills defers to Superpowers when it is installed, and falls back to its own pipeline when it is absent. Superpowers is a soft/recommended dependency (runtime-detected, like graphify) — never required.

  • /speccy uses superpowers:brainstorming for requirements exploration, but still owns the specs/*.md artifact + pending-build marker.
  • /build keeps its explore stage, and its review and verify stages now dispatch unconditionally to the native /code-review + /security-review
    • /verify pipeline, but the plan/implement core still routes to superpowers:executing-plans / superpowers:subagent-driven-development.
  • /ship keeps sync + branch + commit + CI-poll + auto-fix, but hands the final integration to superpowers:finishing-a-development-branch (merge/PR/cleanup options) instead of silently auto-merging.
  • /prime surfaces a passive hint if graphify-out/ exists (query via /graphify) — hint only, no dependency.

Each of /speccy, /build, /ship accepts --no-superpowers to force the standalone pipeline. When Superpowers is absent, all skills behave exactly as their standalone descriptions below.

Implemented: this deferral behavior is specified in specs/superpowers-complementary-layer.md. Detection runs through the on-disk glob helper scripts/lib/superpowers.js and the shared contract in references/superpowers-deferral.md, wired into /speccy, /build, /ship, and the /prime graphify hint.

Read the full file on GitHub · 402 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. 3d ago Changed · +1 lines · +14 tokens per session 75b281c47864
  2. 9d ago First seen · 401 lines · 4,772 tokens per session scan A 49a9dc33026d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

mad-skills CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository slamb2k/mad-skills (5 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 4,786 tokens to every session, about $0.0239 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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