dotclaude

dotclaude

Yossef Mendelssohn's Claude Code config.

Consideration

This is personal config, and it's going to reflect my preferences, workflows, and the way I think about things. I'm not against others using any of it, but I'd encourage you to treat it as inspiration rather than installation.

What's Here

• CLAUDE.md — the top-level instructions Claude always has in context: communication style, behavior, &c.
• rules/ — more detailed rules, also always loaded: code style, development workflow, honesty, ADRs, self-improvement, RTK
• skills/ — invokable skills that extend Claude's capabilities for specific tasks
• agents/ — custom subagent configurations
• settings.json — Claude Code settings
• hooks/ — the PreToolUse guards and command rewrites registered in settings.json, with checks over them in hooks/test/ (./hooks/test/run-checks.sh)
• scripts/ — tooling for maintaining skills across this repo and a separate team skills repo
• docs/adr/ — architecture decision records

Prerequisites

Grouped by how routinely an absence bites, since that varies more than the flat list used to suggest. Claude Code itself goes without saying. The tiers are also the exit-code contract of the check at the end of this section.

Required — the absence breaks something broadly, and not always loudly:

• jq — every PreToolUse hook parses its input with it. Without jq they all pass through, so the reflexive-cd guard, the shell-machinery guard and the uv-run guard are off, not merely quiet. Only reflexive-cd-guard.sh and the vendored rtk-rewrite.sh say anything about it; the rest exit in silence.
• Python 3 — runs the session-handoff scripts, scripts/rules-sections.py, and the skill validators, and the python→python3 rewrite hook targets it. Without it, handoff creation and loading fail. Loud, at least.

Load-bearing — the absence stops or slows ordinary work, loudly:

• RTK — the hooks and rules assume it. Without it the rewrite hook passes commands through unchanged and warns, so nothing breaks — but a good share of the Bash allow rules are written in rtk … form and stop matching, which means approval prompts for commands you already granted. The lost token savings are the smaller half of this.
• gh — the development-workflow rules reach for it constantly: PR and issue state, review comments, the checks before a merge is called ready. Without it that whole surface is unreachable from a session, and there is no in-session fallback. git itself is untouched, so pushing and pulling still work.
• uv — runs three things: the ascii-diagram-validator skill's script, which any session can invoke; the skill-architecture skill's validator and scaffolding scripts, which is what uv-run-guard.sh guards; and the Python test suite, which has no other working invocation because the system python3 carries no pytest. Without it the first of those fails wherever the skill fires. See ADR 0008 for the tier.

Optional — the absence shows only on a path you may never take:

• trafilatura — extracts a web page's main content as markdown, the first choice for reading a page under the searching rules (uv tool install trafilatura). Without it those fetches fall back to curl for raw HTML or WebFetch for a summary, both of which still work — you lose a compact verbatim option, not a capability.

To verify these are on your PATH, run ./scripts/check-prerequisites.sh — it reports each one with its tier, and exits 1 if anything in the required tier is missing. A missing load-bearing or optional prerequisite is reported and leaves the exit code at 0.

Installation

There's a Makefile to make this simple. Just clone and go.

$ git clone https://github.com/ymendel/dotclaude.git
$ cd dotclaude
$ make

See the Makefile for the specific steps. In short, it symlinks the repo to ~/.claude.

Appreciation

• softaworks/agent-toolkit — several agents and skills adapted from here, including session-handoff
• VoltAgent/awesome-claude-code-subagents — source for many of the agents
• terrylica/cc-skills — ascii-diagram-validator and skill-architecture skills
• supabase/agent-skills — supabase-postgres-best-practices skill
• mattpocock/skills — tdd and knowledge-grill skills
• alkofu/ai-tpk — commit-message-guide skill
• Flagrant — adr, adr-refine, purposeful-commits, and rails-test-discipline skills
• Chris Arcand — Purposeful Commits — the method the purposeful-commits skill is built on
• fredrik-hansen — the honesty rules started here
• Strunk & White's The Elements of Style — the writing skill is built around it

License

MIT. Skills adapted from upstream projects carry an ATTRIBUTION.md preserving the upstream notice. See each skill's directory.