evolving-claude-md

evolving-claude-md is a skill for Claude Code from alexmond/alexmskills. It costs 0 tokens per session (5,008 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A setup for keeping CLAUDE.md, the instruction file Claude reads in a project, as a short record of durable decisions and lessons. It checks new entries and prompts cleanup when the record becomes too large.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to add a bounded Decisions & Learnings section to CLAUDE.md, check entries before they are written, and audit the file at session starts and after context compression.
Why use it?
Long instruction files consume context space and can make future sessions less focused. The setup helps keep useful project knowledge while removing outdated or overly detailed notes.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} variable. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code.

Not installable: its command points at a path on the author’s own machine, so it runs nowhere else. The line is /home/alex/….

Part of the evolving-claude-md plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit Use it to add a bounded Decisions & Learnings section to CLAUDE.md, check entries before they are written, and audit the file at session starts and after context compression.

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Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add alexmond/alexmskills
Claude Code
/plugin install evolving-claude-md

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install evolving-claude-md, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

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.

agentmods badge for evolving-claude-md

README.md
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Your own site
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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.

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Your own site · 80×15
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Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,008 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
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 $0.00000 $0.05008
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.02504
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.01002
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00501

Measured 9d ago against content hash 3639d07cfe6f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

evolving-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 9d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 6 executable files (archive-decisions.py, audit-claude-md.py, capture-triggers.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/evolving-claude-md/skills/evolving-claude-md/SKILL.md · 331 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 331 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Evolving CLAUDE.md

Try it: /evolving-claude-md:evolving-claude-md — or say "make CLAUDE.md evolve".

CLAUDE.md is read into Claude's context on every turn. Every byte costs tokens. So the goal isn't "log everything we learned" — it's a small, well-pruned set of durable decisions that future-Claude needs, with everything else linked to or archived.

This skill wires that. Three mechanisms keep it healthy automatically:

Hook When What it does
SessionStart start of every session audit-claude-md.py — if the D&L section is bloated, injects a recommendation to compact
PreToolUse on Write|Edit of CLAUDE.md before each edit lint-claude-md.py — rejects new entries that violate the format (no topic tag, no date, > 200 chars)
PostCompact after context compaction re-runs the audit so the assistant sees the current D&L state without paying for the full file twice

When installed as a plugin, the three hooks ship inside the plugin (hooks/hooks.json, pathed via ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}) and register automatically once enabled — nothing to add to your settings. For a manual install, copy the three scripts to .claude/skills/evolving-claude-md/ and add the hooks to .claude/settings.json (see Setup checklist). Disable individually by removing the entry; disable all via disableAllHooks: true in settings.

Not for documenting a codebase from scratch — that's init. This adds the mechanism that keeps the file current and bounded once it exists.

Format — the contract every entry must follow

- YYYY-MM-DD — **topic-tag** — short statement. Why: brief reason. [Optional: see → docs/decisions/...].
  • YYYY-MM-DD — calendar date, no relative dates.
  • **topic-tag** — kebab-case, one or two words, MANDATORY. Reuse existing tags where they fit; the lint hook surfaces the inventory. Pick a stable vocabulary per project (e.g. auth, build, schema, ci, perf).
  • One sentence of what. The why is the load-bearing half — lead with constraint, incident, or preference.
  • Hard cap: 200 chars in the body, max 3 lines. Bigger? Move the detail to docs/decisions/{YYYY-MM-DD}-{topic}.md and keep the entry as a one-line teaser linking there. The lint hook enforces this.

Read the full file on GitHub · 331 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 9d ago First seen · 331 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 3639d07cfe6f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

evolving-claude-md is a skill published in the GitHub repository alexmond/alexmskills (6 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 5,008 tokens. 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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