Claude Code
A collection of the text prompts Claude Code uses internally, extracted and updated per release.Piebald-AI/claude-code-system-prompts
- Stars
- 13.1k
- Forks
- 2k
- Licence
- MIT
- Language
- JavaScript
- Last update
- 6 days ago
- Type
- Other
What it is
This repository is a catalog of the system prompts, tool descriptions, and sub-agent prompts that Claude Code (Anthropic's coding assistant) uses. The prompts are extracted from Claude Code's published npm package and listed as markdown files with token counts. It is updated within minutes of each Claude Code release and includes a changelog of prompt changes across versions.
- Browse the sub-agent prompts for Explore and Plan to see how they are instructed
- Read the /code-review prompt variants to compare behavior across effort levels
- Check the CHANGELOG.md to see how prompts changed between Claude Code versions
- Use the extracted prompts as a reference when writing your own agent prompts
Great for
- Developers who want to read how Claude Code is instructed behind the scenes
- People studying prompt design for coding agents
- Developers planning to customize their own Claude Code installation with tweakcc
- Anyone tracking how Claude Code's prompts change between versions
Not ideal for
- People looking for a tool to write or run code, since this is only prompt text (reason: nothing here is executable software)
- Users who expect official documentation from Anthropic (reason: this is a third-party extraction from compiled code)
How to get it
- 1
Read it online
Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/Piebald-AI/claude-code-system-prompts - 2
Run it
- Open the repository on GitHub and go to the system-prompts folder
- Open a prompt file such as the Explore sub-agent prompt
- Compare it with an older version using CHANGELOG.md
- 3
Get the most out of it
- Use the changelog to see what changed in each Claude Code release
- Use tweakcc if you want to modify individual prompts in your own Claude Code installation
- Star the repository to be notified of new Claude Code versions via releases
Downloads
Strengths
- Prompts are extracted directly from Claude Code's compiled source, so they match what the tool uses
- Updated within minutes of each release, with a changelog across many versions
- Token counts are listed for each prompt, which helps with cost and size awareness
Trade-offs
- Prompts can be partly interpolated at runtime, so counts in a live session may differ slightly
- It is a reference collection, not a runnable program or library
- The README is truncated here, so I could not verify every listed file or feature
How it compares
| Project | Stars | Type | Level | Updated | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| claude-code-system-prompts (this) | 13.1k | Other | beginner | 6 days ago | Developers who want to read how Claude Code is instructed behind the scenes |
| agent-skills | 113k | Other | beginner | 4 days ago | Developers who already use an AI coding agent and want more structured, test-driven output |
| claude-howto | 46.4k | Learning resource | beginner | 4 days ago | Developers who have installed Claude Code and want to go beyond basic prompts |
| claude-skills | 12.2k | Other | beginner | 6 days ago | Developers who already use Claude Code and work across frontend, backend, and infrastructure |
| ECC | 295k | Dev tool | intermediate | 4 days ago | Developers who already use Claude Code and want a shared workflow for planning, testing and review |
| hermes-agent | 260k | AI model / agent | intermediate | 4 days ago | Developers who want a personal agent they can host on their own server or machine |
Stats synced from GitHub. The assessment above was drafted with AI from the project's README on 2026-10-29 and may miss recent changes — check the README before relying on a command. MIT licence: free to use, modify and distribute, including commercially, as long as you keep the copyright notice.