agent-starter

Anthropic's own engineering patterns, extracted from the Claude Code CLI source leak and packaged into reusable skills, templates, and guides for bootstrapping AI-agent-friendly projects.

Usage

Point an AI agent at this repo and say "read this repo and set up my project" — the agent reads AGENT.md and scaffolds a complete project interactively.

Or install the /new-project skill once and run it in any session:

npx skills add sneg55/agent-starter -a claude-code -g

Then: /new-project

Guides

guides/large-codebase-best-practices.md

Comprehensive best practices for setting up and scaling a large codebase with Claude Code — directory structure, file size targets, naming conventions, error handling, CLAUDE.md hierarchy, and more. All derived from analyzing Anthropic's own Claude Code CLI source.

guides/hooks-reference.md

Complete reference for Claude Code's hook system — all 4 hook types, all 27 events, exit code behavior, configuration format, and 10 practical examples (auto-lint, block dangerous commands, agent verification, security review, Slack notifications, and more).

Templates

templates/NEW_PROJECT_PROMPT.md

Copy-paste prompt for Claude Code to scaffold a new project from scratch. Covers directory structure, CLAUDE.md hierarchy, modular rules, error handling, constants, env validation, git setup, and coding standards. Just fill in the {{placeholders}} and go.

templates/CLAUDE.md

Drop-in project instructions template with the full 4-type memory taxonomy (user, feedback, project, reference), memory file format, consolidation workflow, recall guidelines, and git safety rules.

Usage:

# Option A: paste the prompt into Claude Code for a new project
cat templates/NEW_PROJECT_PROMPT.md

# Option B: drop the CLAUDE.md template into an existing project
cp templates/CLAUDE.md /path/to/your/project/CLAUDE.md

Skills

Install all skills globally with npx skills:

npx skills add sneg55/agent-starter -a claude-code -g

/simplify

Code review and cleanup — spawns 3 parallel agents (Code Reuse, Quality, Efficiency) to review your git diff and fix issues.

/remember

Memory review and organization — scans auto-memory entries and proposes promotions to CLAUDE.md, CLAUDE.local.md, or shared memory. Detects duplicates, outdated entries, and conflicts.

/commit

Create a single well-crafted git commit. Analyzes diff, follows repo's commit style, writes a "why not what" message. Includes Git Safety Protocol.

/commit-push-pr

Full git workflow — creates branch, commits, pushes, and creates/updates a PR with summary and test plan. Detects existing PRs and updates them.

/dream

Memory consolidation — reflective pass that merges, prunes, and re-indexes memory files. Run periodically to keep memories organized. Works through 4 phases: orient, gather, consolidate, prune.

/new-project

Full project bootstrap — interviews the developer (name, description, stack, components), then scaffolds directory structure, CLAUDE.md, config files, hooks, skills, and first commit. Mirrors AGENT.md.

Memory Taxonomy

The template uses a 4-type memory system:

Type	Scope	What belongs
user	Who they are	Role, goals, preferences, knowledge level
feedback	How to work	Corrections AND confirmations — both what to avoid and keep doing
project	What's happening	Ongoing work, deadlines, incidents, decisions
reference	Where to look	Pointers to external systems (Linear, Grafana, Slack, etc.)

Key principles:

• Never save what's derivable from code/git
• Convert relative dates to absolute
• Structure feedback with Why + How to apply
• Verify memories against current state before acting on them