christophecapel

Claude Mechanisms — Development skill for Claude Code

Development community

Operating mechanisms for Claude Code.

How to install Claude Mechanisms

This entry records only its repository, not the path inside it, so there is no exact command to give. Open christophecapel/claude-mechanisms and copy the folder into ~/.claude/skills/, or the file into ~/.claude/agents/.

What Claude Mechanisms does

Operating mechanisms for Claude Code. Not rules. Not principles. Mechanisms with triggers, retry logic, and failure notifications. 20+ mechanisms, MIT.

Alternatives in Development

LifeOS — ⛰️ The Life Operating System — an intent engineering platform that moves you from your current state to your i 18.7k ★
Fable OS — An agentic operating system where the kernel is controlled directly by Claude 324 ★
Obsidian Init — Scan your vault and generate a _CLAUDE.md operating manual, index.md catalog, and log.md 277 ★

README

![Banner Alt Text](banner-claude-mechanisms.png)

![License: MIT](https://img.shields.io/badge/License-MIT-green.svg) ![Built for](https://img.shields.io/badge/Built%20for-Claude%20Code-orange.svg) ![Version](https://img.shields.io/badge/version-v3.1-blue.svg) ![Stability](https://img.shields.io/badge/stability-stable-brightgreen.svg)

"Good intentions don't work. Mechanisms do." -- Jeff Bezos

Operating mechanisms codified from working with Claude Code every day. Distilled into the ones that actually stuck.

Not rules (rules get forgotten between sessions). Not principles (too abstract to enforce). **Mechanisms** -- with triggers, retry logic, and failure notifications that fire whether you remember them or not.

Why mechanisms, not rules?

Early on, when something went wrong, I'd ask Claude to prevent it happening again. It would write a rule or save a note in memory. Next session? Gone. So I started thinking harder about what actually sticks.

A mechanism has:

A clear trigger (not manual memory)
Consistent execution when the trigger fires
A defined expected outcome
Retry logic (up to N attempts) when the outcome isn't met
A failure notification if retries are exhausted -- never fail silently

Stability commitment (v3.0)

v3.0 marks the catalog as **stable**. 27 mechanisms cataloged, with implementations across 5 release themes in the paired [`claude-mechanisms-tools`](https://github.com/christophecapel/claude-mechanisms-tools).

**What stable means here:**

Existing mechanism IDs are permanent. The numbers (1-25) are stable identifiers used by tools.yaml mechanism_ids: arrays in the toolkit. They never get renumbered or reused.
Existing mechanism file paths (mechanisms/NN-name.md) WILL NOT break in v3.x
Existing mechanisms.yaml entries (id, name, file, scope, implementations) preserve their schema in v3.x
The bidirectional cross-link contract with the toolkit is permanent: every `mechanisms.yam