claude-md-hygiene

claude-md-hygiene is a skill for Claude Code from w2ur/claude-code-setup. It costs 83 tokens per session (1,423 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of instructions for shortening and reorganizing CLAUDE.md files, which are project guidance files loaded by Claude Code. It explains which rules should remain there and which domain-specific knowledge should move into separate skills.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when editing, pruning, restructuring, or measuring CLAUDE.md files and when moving project knowledge into skills.
Why use it?
It helps reduce instructions loaded into every coding session without removing safety rules or important facts, and requires checking that extracted rules are still covered.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md.

Good fit Use it when editing, pruning, restructuring, or measuring CLAUDE.md files and when…

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/w2ur/claude-code-setup/claude-md-hygiene
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.

Any agent
npx skills add w2ur/claude-code-setup --skill claude-md-hygiene
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/w2ur/claude-code-setup

Made for: Claude Code.

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 claude-md-hygiene

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/w2ur/claude-code-setup/claude-md-hygiene.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/w2ur/claude-code-setup/claude-md-hygiene)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/w2ur/claude-code-setup/claude-md-hygiene"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/w2ur/claude-code-setup/claude-md-hygiene.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 83 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,423 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 $0.00083 $0.01423
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.00711
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00285
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00142

Measured 6d ago against content hash 476114f218b1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

claude-md-hygiene 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 6d 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/claude-md-hygiene/SKILL.md · 119 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 119 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cutting a CLAUDE.md without losing a fact

A CLAUDE.md is loaded in full into every session started under it, so its size is a recurring tax, not a one-off cost. ~/.claude/scripts/claude-md-weight.sh measures every file on the machine and owns the size threshold — read the number there, never re-type it in prose. (Restated numbers are exactly what that script measures.)

The four buckets

Sort every paragraph. This is the whole method.

bucket test action
guard prevents a wrong action a session would otherwise take KEEP, compressed to the rule
instruction a task that will eventually be finished DELETE when done
domain knowledge true, but only needed once you are already in that subsystem MOVE to a skill
archaeology how we found out, or what we used to believe DELETE — git log holds it

Refinements that decide the hard cases:

  • A measured-wrong rule stays. "This looks like an obvious improvement but was measured to be wrong" is a guard, because without it a session re-derives the wrong belief from the same evidence. State it as a rule, never as a story.
  • Money-path, auth and secrets rules stay, always.
  • The measurement itself goes to the skill. The rule is the guard; the falsifying control, the numbers and the retraction narrative are domain knowledge.
  • When a belief here turns out wrong, delete the wrong sentence. Do not strike it through and explain. Keep a retraction only where a future session would independently re-derive the wrong belief from the same evidence.
  • Never hand-type a count, an inventory or a file list. Derive it, or omit it. This construction has drifted repeatedly — "eighteen scripts" when there were nineteen, "Eight plugins" when there were ten, a plist count written from memory.
  • Each script is the source of truth for its own numbers (retentions, weights, thresholds, tiers). Prose describes them and must never restate them.

Read the full file on GitHub · 119 lines

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. 6d ago First seen · 119 lines · 83 tokens per session scan A 476114f218b1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

claude-md-hygiene is a skill published in the GitHub repository w2ur/claude-code-setup (2 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 83 tokens to every session and 1,423 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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