gbasin

Clanker Discipline — Development skill for Claude Code

Development community

An agent skill designed to discipline coding agents against state explosion, grab-bag models, and mutation ambiguity.

How to install Clanker Discipline

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

What Clanker Discipline does

An agent skill designed to discipline coding agents against state explosion, grab-bag models, and mutation ambiguity.

Alternatives in Development

Cipher — An opensource memory layer specifically designed for coding agents 3.6k ★
Discipline — Toggle discipline mode — auto-invoke verification, brainstorming-before-coding, and review checks 2.8k ★
Ii Researcher — II-Researcher: a new open-source framework designed to aid building search / research agents 505 ★

README

clanker-discipline

Discipline AI coding agents against state explosion, grab-bag models, and mutation ambiguity.

Install

npx skills add gbasin/clanker-discipline --all -g

What it does

AI coding agents overproduce state — every bug gets one more flag, every feature one more optional field. This skill teaches agents to:

Derive, don't store — if it can be computed from existing data, don't cache it in a flag
Make wrong states impossible — discriminated unions over optional bags, null over sentinels, branded primitives
Enforce function contracts — pure functions stay pure; mutate+void or clone+return, never both
Data over procedure — if every branch returns the same shape, it's a table, not an if-chain

Credits

Combines ideas from [theswerd/aicode](https://github.com/theswerd/aicode) ([self-documenting code](https://github.com/theswerd/aicode/blob/main/skills/self-documenting-code/SKILL.md)) and [Tommy D. Rossi's event sourcing post](https://x.com/__morse/status/2032107422525907273) on combating agent state explosion.