constitution-builder

An interview-style tool for creating or improving a project’s `CONSTITUTION.md` file. That file records the project’s mission, users, guiding principles, technical limits, and non-goals.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to gather project context, review the existing codebase, and assemble or refine the project constitution.
Why use it?
It helps turn scattered project decisions into a short reference for future product and technical work.

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/tentacleopera/switchboard/constitution-builder
Any agent
npx skills add TentacleOpera/switchboard --skill constitution-builder
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TentacleOpera/switchboard

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 427 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 $0.00000 $0.00427
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00214
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00085
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00043

Measured 2d ago against content hash b84a5a68148d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

constitution-builder 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.

.agents/protocols/constitution-builder/SKILL.md · 44 lines

What it actually says

Skill: Constitution Builder

Overview

Interview-style skill to build or improve a lean, high-level CONSTITUTION.md focusing on the soul of the project (mission, target users, guiding principles, stack constraints, and non-goals) rather than detailed coding standards or formatting guidelines.

Usage

When invoked to build or improve a constitution, lead the user through a structured interview process or gather context from the existing codebase to assemble and refine the constitution file.

Process

1. Context Collection & Interview

Prompt the user with target questions or propose answers based on repository analysis:

  1. Mission: What is the name of this project, and in one sentence, what is its primary reason for existing?
  2. Target Users: Who are the primary users, and what is their main pain point?
  3. Guiding Principles: What are the 3–5 non-negotiable values that should govern every technical and product decision? Give each a short name and one concrete sentence explaining what it means in practice.
  4. Technical Constraints: What are the hard technical boundaries? List required languages, core frameworks, data stores, and key third-party services.
  5. Non-Goals: What are specific things this project will NOT do in its current scope? (Prevents scope creep.)

2. Document Construction

Write the draft or updated sections strictly adhering to this template:

# [Project Name] Constitution

> **Mission:** [one sentence]

## Guiding Principles
- **[Name]:** [concrete explanation]

## Target Users
[Who they are and their main pain point]

## Technical Constraints & Stack
- Core Language & Frameworks: ...
- Data Layer: ...
- Key External Services: ...

## Non-Goals
- [Explicit exclusion 1]
- [Explicit exclusion 2]

Keep the document short (under 150 lines total). Do not include coding conventions, formatting standards, or test suites, as these belong in CLAUDE.md or .cursor/rules/.

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 · 44 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A b84a5a68148d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

constitution-builder is a skill published in the GitHub repository TentacleOpera/switchboard (213 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 427 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 2026-08-30.

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