tale-mode

A work-discipline mode for complex or high-stakes coding tasks. It organizes planning, recorded decisions, source-based verification, parallel work, adversarial review, and an optional loop that keeps checking whether defined gates pass.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to structure complex builds, review decisions, delegate independent work, run verification gates, and continue a deliberate kickoff phase across Claude Code or OpenAI Codex.
Why use it?
It provides a repeatable process for work where overlooked requirements, unsupported assumptions, or unverified changes are costly.

Plugin for Claude Code

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.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add alicicek/tale-mode
agentmods
npx agentmods add plugins/alicicek/tale-mode/tale-mode
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alicicek/tale-mode

Made for: Claude Code.

Per session not measured What this adds to a session before it is invoked.
When invoked not measured Not applicable: nothing here is loaded into a session.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Security

Grade A, and why

tale-mode 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.

plugins/tale-mode/.claude-plugin/plugin.json · 23 lines

What it actually says

{
  "$schema": "https://json.schemastore.org/claude-code-plugin-manifest.json",
  "name": "tale-mode",
  "displayName": "Tale Mode",
  "version": "2.6.1",
  "description": "A discipline mode for complex/high-stakes work: staged planning, decisions-with-receipts, verify-against-source, parallel delegation, adversarial review. Always-on core disciplines via a SessionStart hook, plus a self-armed autonomous loop (a deterministic Stop gate) that can also arm itself from a committed, content-hash-trusted .claude/tale-mode.json during a kickoff phase. Plan-mode investigation runs without a wall of permission dialogs: a fail-closed PreToolUse hook auto-approves provably read-only shell in plan mode only (kill switch TALE_PLAN_APPROVE=0; see SECURITY.md). Cross-platform: the skill + autonomous loop run on both Claude Code and OpenAI Codex (on Codex the loop needs the one-time `touch ~/.tale-mode-allow-cwd-root` opt-in \u2014 its hook subprocesses don't receive env config). Helper skills: trust (the two user-only opt-in files), seed-gates (suggest committed gates), end-phase (clear the phase marker). The optional read-only stuck-loop governor (one advisory model call per stuck goal) ships as the companion plugin tale-mode-governor.",
  "author": {
    "name": "Ali Cicek",
    "url": "https://github.com/alicicek"
  },
  "homepage": "https://github.com/alicicek/tale-mode",
  "repository": "https://github.com/alicicek/tale-mode",
  "license": "MIT",
  "keywords": [
    "workflow",
    "planning",
    "discipline",
    "stop-hook",
    "autonomous-loop",
    "review"
  ],
  "defaultEnabled": true
}
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 · 23 lines scan A 0d53152e0e93

Subscribe to this mod's changes

tale-mode is a plugin published in the GitHub repository alicicek/tale-mode (36 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. Its token cost is not measured: this kind of file is read by the harness, not the model. 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.