A drop-in CLAUDE.md behavioral contract + a verify-before-done guardrail skill for Claude Code. Free, MIT-licensed, no signup to use.
Your Claude Code setup is probably fighting you — forgetting context, editing the wrong files, calling broken work "done." This is the single highest-leverage fix: copy two files in, tune, done.
A great model with a sloppy harness is a junior dev with amnesia. The two pieces in this repo are the highest-leverage parts of a production setup:
CLAUDE.md— a behavioral contract (not a wish list): response style, opinionated-peer behavior, decision-fork handling, a "done means done" rule, and root-cause error prevention. The agent re-reads it every session.skills/verify-before-done.md— a guardrail skill: the agent must run a real check and quote the output before claiming "done", "fixed", or "passing." Evidence before assertions.
| File | What it does |
|---|---|
CLAUDE.md |
Drop-in behavioral contract — place, then tune. |
skills/verify-before-done.md |
Example guardrail skill: verify before claiming success. |
START-HERE.md |
3-step, ~10-minute quick start. |
- Place the contract. Copy
CLAUDE.mdto your project root (project rules) or~/.claude/CLAUDE.md(global). Start a fresh Claude Code session so it loads. - Add the skill. Copy
skills/verify-before-done.mdto~/.claude/skills/verify-before-done/SKILL.md. - Tune it. Edit the contract to match how you actually work — response style, your stack, your conventions.
This is the free starter. The full Claude Code Setup Playbook adds the parts that take a setup from "works" to "compounds":
- A skill library that scales (structure, naming, routing — not 300 dead files)
- Model routing that sends cheap work to cheap models automatically
- Persistent memory + a knowledge graph so the agent never re-researches your own work
- Guardrail hooks (verify-before-done, pre-build recall) wired and enforced
- A publication-quality PDF/HTML output pipeline
→ Grab the fuller free kit + get on the list for the full Playbook: https://expressive446.gumroad.com/l/qlypgs
Built and run by someone who ships with this stack daily.
MIT — free to use, adapt, and share. See LICENSE.
Claude is a trademark of Anthropic PBC. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic.