vouch CLAUDE.md

Project instructions that orient Claude Code when it works inside the vouch repository. They describe the project's purpose, architecture, and procedures for building, testing, and shipping changes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them when fixing bugs, adding features, preparing releases, or getting a new agent familiar with the vouch codebase.
Why use it?
They reduce repeated explanation when a coding agent starts a new session in the repository and help it follow the project's review rules.

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/vouchdev/vouch/claude-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vouchdev/vouch
Per session 3,221 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 3,221 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 $0.03221 $0.03221
Opus 5 $0.01611 $0.01611
Sonnet 5 $0.00644 $0.00644
Haiku 4.5 $0.00322 $0.00322

Measured 2d ago against content hash 16e31fde9ab1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vouch 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 · 298 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 298 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

CLAUDE.md — orientation for Claude Code working on vouch

This file is read automatically by Claude Code when you open the vouch repository. It exists to make a fresh session productive without you having to re-onboard it every time.

If you're working with vouch from inside a different project (proposing claims, approving them), read README.md instead. This file is for working on vouch — fixing a bug, adding a feature, shipping a release.

For any non-Claude-Code agent — start with AGENTS.md.

North star

Vouch is a knowledge base where every write goes through a review gate. That's the load-bearing invariant. Every other design choice — files on disk, append-only audit log, manifest-driven adapters, thin viewports over the storage layer — is downstream of "writes must be reviewed."

If a PR adds a parallel data path that bypasses proposals.approve(), the PR is wrong. Push back. Find the right factoring.

Architecture (90 seconds)

                        ┌──────────────┐
   Claude Code ─MCP──▶  │              │
   Cursor      ─MCP──▶  │  server.py   │
   Codex       ─MCP──▶  │  jsonl_      │ ─┐
   CLI human   ──────▶  │  server.py   │  │
                        │  cli.py      │  │
                        └──────┬───────┘  │
                               │           │
                               ▼           │
                       ┌──────────────┐    │
                       │ proposals.py │    │   review gate
                       │ lifecycle.py │    │   (kb.approve etc.)
                       └──────┬───────┘    │
                              │            │
                              ▼            │
                       ┌──────────────┐    │
                       │  storage.py  │ ◀──┘
                       │  audit.py    │
                       │  index_db.py │
                       └──────┬───────┘
                              │
                              ▼
              .vouch/  ─── filesystem (yaml + md + jsonl)
                       ─── state.db (FTS5 + optional embeddings, derived)

Read the full file on GitHub · 298 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. 2d ago First seen · 298 lines · 3,221 tokens per session scan A 16e31fde9ab1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vouch CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository vouchdev/vouch (91 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 3,221 tokens to every session, about $0.0161 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.