claude-md-lifecycle

A skill for managing CLAUDE.md files, which are instruction files that tell Claude Code how to work in a project or globally.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for creating, syncing, auditing, fixing, optimizing, and editing project-local or global CLAUDE.md files.
Why use it?
It helps keep these instructions accurate, organized, and aligned with the project as files and settings change.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/data-wise/craft/claude-md
Any agent
npx skills add Data-Wise/craft --skill claude-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Data-Wise/craft

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 133 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,797 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
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 $0.00133 $0.01797
Opus 5 $0.00067 $0.00898
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.00359
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00180

Measured 2d ago against content hash 1c665f553335, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

claude-md-lifecycle 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.

skills/docs/claude-md/SKILL.md · 162 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 162 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

CLAUDE.md Lifecycle

End-to-end management of CLAUDE.md files: scaffold from project-type templates, sync with project state (audit + fix + optimize), and edit sections interactively. Targets both project-local CLAUDE.md and global ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md.

When to Use

  • User asks to create a CLAUDE.md from scratch (new project, missing file)
  • User asks to sync / update / audit / fix / optimize an existing CLAUDE.md
  • User asks to edit a specific section with preview and validation
  • File is over the 150-line budget and needs trimming via pointer architecture
  • Version/count drift detected between CLAUDE.md and project sources (plugin.json, DESCRIPTION, etc.)

When NOT to Use

Situation Use Instead
Applying suggestions from /insights report to global CLAUDE.md insights-apply skill
Classifying which doc types a feature needs doc-classifier skill
Generating release notes / CHANGELOG changelog-automation skill

The boundary with insights-apply: that skill is the rule-applier for one specific source (the /insights report → global CLAUDE.md). This skill is the editor for the full lifecycle (init/sync/edit) of any CLAUDE.md. They share the underlying sync pipeline (utils/claude_md_sync.py) but enter it from different intents.

Three Phases

Phase 1: Init (scaffold)

Create a new CLAUDE.md from a project-type template (lean, < 150 lines, pointer architecture).

Step Action
1 Detect project type: plugin (.claude-plugin/plugin.json), teaching (_quarto.yml + course.yml), r-package (DESCRIPTION)
2 Scan metadata: version, counts (commands/skills/agents), test count, repo URL, git branch
3 Populate lean template with discovered values
4 Show preview with line count vs budget
5 Create file after confirmation; run post-creation audit

Flags: --type, --force (overwrite), --dry-run, --global (target ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md)

Refusal: if file exists and --force not set, redirect to sync.

Read the full file on GitHub · 162 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 2d ago First seen · 162 lines · 133 tokens per session scan A 1c665f553335

Subscribe to this mod's changes

claude-md-lifecycle is a skill published in the GitHub repository Data-Wise/craft (4 stars, last pushed 17d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 133 tokens to every session and 1,797 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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