vishalsachdev

Claude Mental Models — Development skill for Claude Code

Development community

How Claude Code's evolving surface guides users to build new mental models: a triangulated, persona-aware analysis of 17 months of releases (Apr 2025–Aug 2026), refreshed incrementally.

How to install Claude Mental Models

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

What Claude Mental Models does

How Claude Code's evolving surface guides users to build new mental models: a triangulated, persona-aware analysis of 17 months of releases (Apr 2025–Aug 2026), refreshed incrementally. Live notebook: https://vishalsachdev.github.io/claude-mental-models/

Alternatives in Development

  • Releases — 92.5k ★
  • Jupyter Notebook — Create clean, reproducible Jupyter notebooks for experiments and tutorials 14.6k ★
  • Releasing — This project ships as a Claude Code plugin 10.9k ★

README

Claude Code Mental Models

Analysis of how Claude Code's changelog and Anthropic's blogs reveal the evolving mental models of Claude Code use — 4,919 changelog entries across 380 releases (v0.2.21 – v2.1.251, April 2025 – August 2026) and 45 blog posts. The 13 themes were derived on the corpus through 2026-05-23 and extended by an incremental refresh (`cmm.refresh`, see `docs/methodology.md` §5). See the design spec and plan in `docs/superpowers/`, and findings in `docs/findings.md`.

Run the pipeline

uv sync
# LLM calls use the local `claude` CLI (subscription auth) — no API key needed.
uv run python -m cmm.collect_changelog
uv run python -m cmm.collect_blogs
uv run python -m cmm.tag_and_join
uv run python -m cmm.embed_cluster
uv run python -m cmm.thematic_coding
uv run marimo run notebooks/analysis.py

To extend the corpus to the latest upstream release **without** re-deriving the themes (incremental refresh — themes and clusters stay fixed, only new entries are assigned):

uv run python -m cmm.collect_changelog   # checks out origin/main, re-parses
uv run python -m cmm.collect_blogs       # carries previous URLs forward
uv run python -m cmm.tag_and_join
uv run python -m cmm.refresh             # writes refresh_report.json; stops if a trigger fires

All network and LLM calls are cached in `data/cache/`.

Deliverable

`notebooks/analysis.py` — a marimo notebook: feature-volume / churn / blog-coverage / mental-model-emergence charts, an interactive cluster explorer, a themes reference table, and a RAG chat panel grounded in the corpus.

Licensing

  • Code (src/, notebooks/, tests/): MIT, © 2026 Vishal Sachdev.
  • Derived data (data/processed/ theme, assignment, join, persona and coherence tables, and the JSON summaries): CC BY 4.0 — see the data card for the per-file table, provenance and a suggested citation.
  • Upstream text: the