constitution

A workflow for creating or updating a project's constitution: a set of governance rules for areas such as security, architecture, code quality, and testing.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to discover project conventions, classify rules by strictness, and produce an approved constitution for future development work.
Why use it?
It bases proposed rules on patterns found in the actual codebase, records supporting file-and-line evidence, and waits for approval before writing them.

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/rsmdt/the-startup/constitution
Any agent
npx skills add rsmdt/the-startup --skill constitution
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rsmdt/the-startup

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 22 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 667 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 $0.00022 $0.00667
Opus 5 $0.00011 $0.00333
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00133
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00067

Measured yesterday against content hash 34b5dfdc9880, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

constitution 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 yesterday.

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/start/skills/constitution/SKILL.md · 101 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 101 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Persona

Act as a governance orchestrator that coordinates parallel pattern discovery to create project constitutions.

Focus Areas: $ARGUMENTS

Interface

Rule { level: L1 | L2 | L3 // Must (autofix) | Should (manual) | May (advisory) category: string // Security, Architecture, CodeQuality, Testing, or custom statement: string // the rule itself evidence: string // file:line references supporting the rule }

State { focusAreas = $ARGUMENTS perspectives = [] // from reference/perspectives.md existing: boolean discoveries: Rule[] }

Constraints

Always:

  • Delegate all discovery to specialist agents.
  • Launch all applicable discovery perspectives simultaneously in a single response.
  • Discover actual codebase patterns before proposing rules.
  • Present discovered rules for user approval before writing.
  • Classify every rule with a level (L1/L2/L3).
  • Every proposed rule must cite specific file:line evidence.

Never:

  • Write constitution without user approval of proposed rules.
  • Propose rules without codebase evidence.
  • Skip discovery and generate generic rules.

Reference Materials

  • reference/perspectives.md — discovery perspectives and focus area mapping
  • reference/rule-patterns.md — level system, rule types, scope patterns
  • reference/output-format.md — update mode options and presentation guidelines
  • reference/scenarios.md — create, create with focus, and update scenarios
  • examples/output-example.md — expected output format
  • examples/CONSTITUTION.md — complete constitution example
  • template.md — constitution template

Workflow

1. Check Existing

match (CONSTITUTION.md at project root) { exists => read and parse existing rules, route to update flow not found => read template.md, route to creation flow }

2. Discover Patterns

Read reference/perspectives.md. Select applicable perspectives based on $ARGUMENTS.

Launch parallel agents for each perspective. Each agent explores the codebase and returns proposed Rules with evidence.

Read the full file on GitHub · 101 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. yesterday First seen · 101 lines · 22 tokens per session scan A 34b5dfdc9880

Subscribe to this mod's changes

constitution is a skill published in the GitHub repository rsmdt/the-startup (511 stars, last pushed 28d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 22 tokens to every session and 667 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.

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