Chaparral

chaparral

The connective tissue between your projects.

Chaparral manages shared [Claude Code](https://claude.ai/code) skills and brand identity across every repo in an organization. One brand repo holds the truth. Chaparral links it everywhere it needs to go.

Built for people who work across multiple orgs and clients. Multi-org by default.

The problem

You have an org directory — say `~/code/manzanita-research/` — with a dozen repos inside. They share a design language, a brand voice, a set of Claude Code skills that shape how AI works with your code. But Claude Code discovers skills per-project (`.claude/skills/`) or globally (`~/.claude/skills/`). There's no org level.

So you copy things around. You forget. Projects drift. The new repo never gets the frontend design skill. The brand voice doc is three versions behind in half your projects.

Claude Code has a plugin marketplace now, but it solves a different problem — distribution to other people and machines. Plugins copy to a cache, require per-repo configuration, and need manual updates after changes. When you're actively developing shared skills across sibling repos, you need something faster.

The fix

Put a `chaparral.json` manifest in your brand repo. Chaparral finds it, reads it, and symlinks your shared skills and org-level `CLAUDE.md` into every sibling repo. Edit a skill in the brand repo and it's instantly live everywhere. No reinstalls, no cache invalidation, no per-repo setup.

~/code/manzanita-research/
├── CLAUDE.md                    ← symlink, managed by chaparral
├── brand/
│   ├── chaparral.json           ← manifest
│   ├── org/
│   │   ├── CLAUDE.md            ← org-wide Claude instructions
│   │   └── skills/
│   │       ├── frontend-design/
│   │       └── brand-voice/
│   └── ...
├── toyon/
│   └── .claude/skills/
│       ├── frontend-design/     ← symlink
│       └── brand-voice/         ← symlink
├── ceanothus/
│   └── .claude/skills/
│       ├── frontend-design/     ← sym