claude-md

claude-md is a skill for Claude Code from xobotyi/cc-foundry. It costs 40 tokens per session (3,482 once invoked), scanned B, original, MIT.

A guide for creating and maintaining CLAUDE.md and .claude/rules files, which give Claude Code instructions about a project.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for organizing project instructions, choosing between global and local rules, and diagnosing loading or compliance problems.
Why use it?
It explains which instruction files are loaded and why some rules are ignored, helping teams place guidance where it will be seen and followed.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: when-to-use in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the the-workflow plugin — 2 skills shipped together

Good fit It is for organizing project instructions, choosing between global and local rules, and diagnosing loading or compliance problems.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/xobotyi/cc-foundry/claude-md
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 xobotyi/cc-foundry --skill claude-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/xobotyi/cc-foundry

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install the-workflow, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 2 skills.

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

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xobotyi/cc-foundry/claude-md/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/xobotyi/cc-foundry/claude-md)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/xobotyi/cc-foundry/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xobotyi/cc-foundry/claude-md/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

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.

agentmods 80×15 button for claude-md

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/xobotyi/cc-foundry/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xobotyi/cc-foundry/claude-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,482 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. 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 $0.00040 $0.03482
Opus 5.5 $0.00016 $0.01393
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00008 $0.00696
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00348

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 123ab3c4ba78, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

claude-md scanned grade B with 1 finding 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 1mo 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.

Strips warnings and disclaimersmediumAnti-refusal

Omitting safety caveats hides risk from the user and is a common jailbreak preamble.

- Cite the specific line and give the replacement inline. Do not lecture
plugins/the-workflow/skills/claude-md/SKILL.md · 223 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 223 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

CLAUDE.md is delivered as a user message after the system prompt, not as configuration. It is read and weighed, never enforced — which is why a rule that must hold every time belongs in a hook or a permission, and why the goal here is compliance, not completeness. A short file that gets followed beats a full one that gets ignored.

What Loads, and When

Routing and trimming decisions are wrong whenever the loading model is wrong. Establish this first.

  • CLAUDE.md and CLAUDE.local.md load at launch from the working directory and every directory above it. Content is ordered from the filesystem root down, so the file closest to the launch directory is read last. Within one directory, CLAUDE.local.md is appended after CLAUDE.md.
  • Files in subdirectories below the working directory do not load at launch. They load when Claude reads a file in that directory. A rule that must hold from the first turn cannot live in a nested CLAUDE.md.
  • Layer scope, broadest to narrowest — managed policy (/Library/Application Support/ClaudeCode/CLAUDE.md on macOS, /etc/claude-code/CLAUDE.md on Linux and WSL, C:\Program Files\ClaudeCode\CLAUDE.md on Windows) → ~/.claude/ → the project (./CLAUDE.md or ./.claude/CLAUDE.md) → ./CLAUDE.local.md. Managed policy cannot be excluded.
  • Load order is not precedence. Every discovered file is concatenated; when two layers contradict, Claude may follow either. Reconcile the conflict rather than relying on "later wins".
  • @path imports expand at launch, up to four hops deep. Splitting a large CLAUDE.md into imports buys organization and never buys context. A path inside backticks stays literal instead of importing.
  • A CLAUDE.md over 4 MiB is skipped entirely — no warning in the file itself.
  • Block-level HTML comments are stripped before injection. Notes for human maintainers cost no tokens.
  • claudeMdExcludes skips files by absolute-path glob, set at any settings layer, with arrays merging across layers. It is the monorepo tool for another team's files, and it excludes their rules along with their CLAUDE.md.
  • Verify what actually loaded with /context, under Memory files. The InstructionsLoaded hook logs each file as it loads, which is how a lazily-loaded rule is debugged.

Read the full file on GitHub · 223 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 1mo ago First seen · 223 lines · 40 tokens per session scan B 123ab3c4ba78

Subscribe to this mod's changes

claude-md is a skill published in the GitHub repository xobotyi/cc-foundry (22 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 3,482 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (strips warnings and disclaimers). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-04.

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