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Claude Code System Prompts

[!tip] NEW (June 12, 2026): We've greatly expanded this list with many more of Claude Code's prompts—from 350 to 515 (+165)—our most complete coverage yet.

This repository contains an up-to-date list of all Claude Code's various system prompts and their associated token counts as of Claude Code v2.1.206 (July 9th, 2026). It also contains a CHANGELOG.md for the system prompts across 232 versions since v2.0.14. From the team behind Piebald.

This repository is updated within minutes of each Claude Code release. See the changelog, and follow @PiebaldAI on X for a summary of the system prompt changes in each release.

[!note] ⭐ Star this repository to get notified about new Claude Code versions. For each new Claude Code version, we create a release on GitHub, which will notify all users who've starred the repository.

Why multiple "system prompts?"

Claude Code doesn't just have one single string for its system prompt.

Instead, there are:

• Large portions conditionally added depending on the environment and various configs.
• Descriptions for builtin tools like Write, Bash, and TodoWrite, and some are fairly large.
• Separate system prompts for builtin agents like Explore and Plan.
• Numerous AI-powered utility functions, such as conversation compaction, CLAUDE.md generation, session title generation, etc. featuring their own systems prompts.

The result—500+ strings that are constantly changing and moving within a very large minified JS file.

[!important] Want to modify a particular piece of the system prompt in your own Claude Code installation? Use tweakcc. It—

• lets you customize the individual pieces of the system prompt as markdown files, and then
• patches your npm-based or native (binary) Claude Code installation with them, and also
• provides diffing and conflict management for when both you and Anthropic have conflicting modifications to the same prompt file.

Extraction

This repository contains the system prompts extracted using a script from the latest npm version of Claude Code. As they're extracted directly from Claude Code's compiled source code, they're guaranteed to be exactly what Claude Code uses. If you use tweakcc to customize the system prompts, it works in a similar way—it patches the exact same strings in your local installation as are extracted into this repository.

Prompts

Note that some prompts contain interpolated bits such as builtin tool name references, lists of available sub agents, and various other context-specific variables, so the actual counts in a particular Claude Code session will differ slightly—likely not beyond ±20 tokens, however.

Agent Prompts

Sub-agents and utilities.

Sub-agents

• Agent Prompt: Explore (871 tks) - System prompt for the Explore subagent.
• Agent Prompt: Plan mode (enhanced) (715 tks) - Enhanced prompt for the Plan subagent.

Creation Assistants

• Agent Prompt: CLAUDE.md creation (513 tks) - System prompt for analyzing codebases and creating CLAUDE.md documentation files.
• Agent Prompt: Status line setup (3230 tks) - System prompt for the statusline-setup agent that configures status line display.

Slash Commands

• Agent Prompt: /batch slash command (1106 tks) - Instructions for orchestrating a large, parallelizable change across a codebase.
• Agent Prompt: /code-review part 1 base finder angles (145 tks) - Line-by-line diff scan instructions for the /code-review slash command's finder-angle phase.
• Agent Prompt: /code-review part 10 ReportFindings output format (287 tks) - Output-format instructions for /code-review runs that report verified findings once through the ReportFindings tool with capped, severity-ranked findings.
• Agent Prompt: /code-review part 2 low effort minimum findings mode (532 tks) - Low-effort /code-review prompt that reads the diff once, targets at least min(files_changed, 4) hunk-visible runtime correctness findings, and performs one extra pass when short.
• Agent Prompt: /code-review part 2 low effort mode (345 tks) - Low-effort /code-review prompt that reads the diff once and returns up to four hunk-visible runtime correctness findings.
• Agent Prompt: /code-review part 3 extra-high and maximum effort modes (0 tks) - Extra-high and maximum-effort /code-review prompt that runs five finder angles, one-vote verification, a gap sweep, and capped JSON findings.
• Agent Prompt: /code-review part 4 three-state verification phase (98 tks) - Verification phase for /code-review that asks one agent verifier to classify each candidate as confirmed, plausible, or refuted.
• Agent Prompt: /code-review part 5 recall-biased verification phase (175 tks) - Recall-biased /code-review verification phase that treats realistic uncertain findings as plausible unless code refutes them.
• Agent Prompt: /code-review part 6 medium effort mode (0 tks) - Medium-effort /code-review prompt that favors precision with three finder angles, one-vote verification, and up to eight JSON findings.
• Agent Prompt: /code-review part 7 high effort mode (0 tks) - High-effort /code-review prompt that favors recall with three finder angles, recall-biased verification, and up to ten JSON findings.
• Agent Prompt: /code-review part 8 GitHub comment posting (152 tks) - Optional /code-review instructions for posting findings as GitHub inline PR comments when --comment is passed.
• Agent Prompt: /code-review part 9 fix application (250 tks) - Optional /code-review instructions for applying findings to the working tree when --fix is passed.
• Agent Prompt: /rename auto-generate session name (80 tks) - Prompt used by /rename (no args) to auto-generate a kebab-case session name from conversation context.
• Agent Prompt: /review slash command (422 tks) - Instructions for the /review command to review a GitHub pull request by gathering PR context and diff with gh, applying optional user instructions, and presenting verified findings.
• Agent Prompt: /schedule slash command (4303 tks) - Guides the user through scheduling, updating, listing, or running remote Claude Code agents on cron triggers via the Anthropic cloud API.
• Agent Prompt: /security-review slash command (2521 tks) - Comprehensive security review prompt for analyzing code changes with focus on exploitable vulnerabilities.
• Agent Prompt: /simplify slash command (362 tks) - Instructions for the /simplify slash command that reviews changed code for reuse, simplification, efficiency, and altitude cleanups, then applies the fixes.

Utilities

• Agent Prompt: Agent Hook (122 tks) - Prompt for an 'agent hook'.
• Agent Prompt: Auto mode rule reviewer (292 tks) - Reviews and critiques user-defined auto mode classifier rules for clarity, completeness, conflicts, and actionability.
• Agent Prompt: Away summary generation (73 tks) - Prompts a no-tools away-summary generation run to recap the goal, current task, and next action when the user returns.
• Agent Prompt: Background agent state classifier (6237 tks) - Classifies the tail of a background agent transcript as working, blocked, done, or failed and returns concise state JSON.
• Agent Prompt: Background job agent instructions (427 tks) - Instructs the built-in background job agent to narrate progress, restate tool results, and emit explicit result, needs input, or failed status signals.
• Agent Prompt: Bash command description writer (207 tks) - Instructions for generating clear, concise command descriptions in active voice for bash commands.
• Agent Prompt: Bash command prefix detection (823 tks) - System prompt for detecting command prefixes and command injection.
• Agent Prompt: Claude Code guide (355 tks) - Subagent that answers Claude Code feature/SDK/API questions.
• Agent Prompt: Claude guide agent (2728 tks) - System prompt for the claude-code-guide agent that answers documentation-grounded questions about Claude Code, Claude Agent SDK, Claude API, and Claude Tag.
• Agent Prompt: Coding session title generator (314 tks) - Generates a title for the coding session.
• Agent Prompt: Context tip reception evaluator (311 tks) - Evaluates whether a shown Claude Code context tip was acted on and whether its reception was positive, neutral, negative, or unknown.
• Agent Prompt: Context tip selector (1489 tks) - Selects whether to show a brief Claude Code feature tip by matching the recent transcript and session metadata against eligible context-tip situations.
• Agent Prompt: Conversation summarization (1795 tks) - System prompt for creating detailed conversation summaries.
• Agent Prompt: Determine which memory files to attach (271 tks) - Agent for determining which memory files to attach for the main agent.
• Agent Prompt: Dream memory consolidation (859 tks) - Instructs an agent to perform a multi-phase memory consolidation pass — orienting on existing memories, gathering recent signal from logs and transcripts, merging updates into topic files, and pruning the index.
• Agent Prompt: General purpose agent (63 tks) - Defines a general-purpose agent for researching complex questions, searching code, and executing multi-step tasks.
• Agent Prompt: General purpose (446 tks) - System prompt for the general-purpose subagent that searches, analyzes, and edits code across a codebase while reporting findings concisely to the caller.
• Agent Prompt: General task agent (99 tks) - Instructs a Claude Code task agent to complete the user's request fully and report the essential outcome.
• Agent Prompt: Hook condition evaluator (stop) (319 tks) - System prompt for evaluating hook conditions, specifically stop conditions, in Claude Code.
• Agent Prompt: Hook condition evaluator (88 tks) - Instructs an agent to judge whether a user-provided hook condition is met.
• Agent Prompt: Inherited context for worktree sub-agent (121 tks) - Briefs a sub-agent that it has inherited a parent session's context and is now working in its own isolated git worktree.
• Agent Prompt: Managed Agents onboarding flow (3806 tks) - Interactive interview script that helps users configure a Managed Agent by describing the task, proposing tools and resources, setting up the environment and session, testing access, and emitting integration code.
• Agent Prompt: Onboarding guide draft share link workflow (323 tks) - Adds instructions for sharing the draft ONBOARDING.md before review, then updating the same ShareOnboardingGuide link after the user answers the review questions.
• Agent Prompt: Onboarding guide generator (1135 tks) - Co-authors a team onboarding guide (ONBOARDING.md) for new Claude Code users by analyzing the creator's usage data, classifying session types, and iterating on the draft collaboratively.
• Agent Prompt: PR follow-up cron (172 tks) - Cron prompt for checking a pull request created in the session and fixing failures, comments, or conflicts.
• Agent Prompt: Prompt Suggestion Generator v2 (344 tks) - V2 instructions for generating prompt suggestions for Claude Code.
• Agent Prompt: Quick PR creation (1600 tks) - Streamlined prompt for creating a commit and pull request with pre-populated context.
• Agent Prompt: Read-only search agent (93 tks) - Defines a read-only search agent for broad fan-out code searches that returns conclusions instead of file dumps.
• Agent Prompt: Recent Message Summarization (1272 tks) - Agent prompt used for summarizing recent messages.
• Agent Prompt: Schedule action selection (114 tks) - Instructs the cloud scheduling agent to ask the user which schedule action to perform first.
• Agent Prompt: Security monitor for autonomous agent actions (first part) (11259 tks) - Instructs Claude to act as a security monitor that evaluates autonomous coding agent actions against block/allow rules to prevent prompt injection, scope creep, and accidental damage.
• Agent Prompt: Security monitor for autonomous agent actions (second part) (24537 tks) - Defines the environment context, block rules, and allow exceptions that govern which tool actions the agent may or may not perform.
• Agent Prompt: Session search (158 tks) - Subagent prompt for searching past Claude Code conversation sessions by scanning .jsonl transcript files and returning matching session IDs.
• Agent Prompt: Session title and branch generation (307 tks) - Agent for generating succinct session titles and git branch names.
• Agent Prompt: Session transcript chunk summary (89 tks) - Instructs an agent to summarize a chunk of a Claude Code session transcript concisely.
• Agent Prompt: Summarization no-tools guard (107 tks) - Shared prefix for compaction summarization agents that forbids tool use and requires plain text analysis and summary blocks.
• Agent Prompt: WebFetch summarizer (189 tks) - Prompt for agent that summarizes verbose output from WebFetch for the main model.
• Agent Prompt: Worker fork (268 tks) - System prompt for a forked worker sub-agent that executes a single directive from the parent agent and reports back concisely.
• Agent Prompt: Workflow script plain text return note (76 tks) - Appended note telling a workflow script agent that its final text response is parsed as the script return value.
• Agent Prompt: Workflow script structured return note (120 tks) - Appended note telling a workflow script agent to return its final answer by calling the structured output tool exactly once.
• Agent Prompt: Workflow subagent plain text output (154 tks) - Instructs an internal workflow subagent to return its final text verbatim as the calling workflow script's parsed result.
• Agent Prompt: Workflow subagent structured output (190 tks) - Instructs an internal workflow subagent to return its final answer by calling the StructuredOutput tool exactly once with schema-valid input.

Data

The content of various template files embedded in Claude Code.

• Data: Anthropic CLI (4615 tks) - Reference documentation for the ant CLI covering installation, authentication, command structure, input and output shaping, managed agents workflows, and scripting patterns.
• Data: Background tasks changed event schema (237 tks) - Schema description for the background_tasks_changed system event and its replace-set semantics.
• Data: Claude API reference — C# (7777 tks) - C# SDK reference including installation, client initialization, basic requests, streaming, and tool use.
• Data: Claude API reference — Go (3268 tks) - Go SDK reference including installation, client initialization, model constants, basic requests, and thinking.
• Data: Claude API reference — Java (4620 tks) - Java SDK reference including installation, client initialization, basic requests, streaming, and beta tool use.
• Data: Claude API reference — PHP (2470 tks) - PHP SDK reference.
• Data: Claude API reference — Python (7119 tks) - Python SDK reference including installation, client initialization, basic requests, thinking, and multi-turn conversation.
• Data: Claude API reference — Ruby (1782 tks) - Ruby SDK reference including installation, client initialization, basic requests, streaming, and beta tool runner.
• Data: Claude API reference — TypeScript (5550 tks) - TypeScript SDK reference including installation, client initialization, basic requests, thinking, and multi-turn conversation.
• Data: Claude API reference — cURL (2890 tks) - Raw API reference for Claude API for use with cURL or else Raw HTTP.
• Data: Claude Code agent proxy troubleshooting guide (2030 tks) - Troubleshooting guide for Claude Code's policy-enforcing HTTPS agent proxy, covering TLS trust setup, status checks, git, docker, and unsupported traffic.
• Data: Claude Code gateway protocol (3857 tks) - Markdown reference documenting the Claude Code gateway wire contract, including OAuth 2.0 device flow, RFC 8414 discovery, Messages API inference, managed settings, model discovery, OTLP telemetry, error envelopes, TLS certificate pinning, and proxying to Bedrock, Vertex, and Foundry.
• Data: Claude Code live documentation sources (2378 tks) - WebFetch URLs for fetching current Claude Code documentation from official sources.
• Data: Claude Code recent changes reference (840 tks) - Reference mapping of recently removed or renamed Claude Code commands, flags, and terms to their current replacements.
• Data: Claude Platform on AWS reference (1608 tks) - Reference documentation for using the Claude Developer Platform through AWS infrastructure, including AnthropicAWS clients, required region and workspace configuration, SigV4 authentication, and short-term API keys.
• Data: Claude Tag (Claude in Slack) reference (1996 tks) - Offline reference for Claude Tag, Claude Code's org-managed Slack surface, covering what it is, availability, setup, configuration, and how it differs from the earlier Claude in Slack app.
• Data: Claude gateway landing page (392 tks) - HTML status page served at a Claude Code gateway root, showing the gateway logo, the running gateway URL, the identity-provider host, an OAuth discovery link, and the gateway version.
• Data: Claude model catalog (4435 tks) - Catalog of current and legacy Claude models with exact model IDs, aliases, context windows, and pricing.
• Data: Context tip situation — manual polling (169 tks) - Situation text for detecting when the user is manually polling status and should be shown the /loop context tip.
• Data: Context tip situation — persistent memory (170 tks) - Situation text for detecting when the user is restating persistent project context and should be shown the memory context tip.
• Data: Context tip situation — subagent fan-out (179 tks) - Situation text for detecting when repeated independent subtasks should be fanned out to subagents.
• Data: Cowork plugin MCP discovery and connection (1338 tks) - Reference guidance for finding MCP connectors during plugin customization, using search and suggestion tools, mapping categories to keywords, and writing .mcp.json entries.
• Data: Cowork plugin component schemas (3109 tks) - Reference documentation for Cowork plugin component formats, including skills, agents, hooks, MCP servers, legacy commands, CONNECTORS.md, and README.md.
• Data: Cowork plugin examples (2323 tks) - Reference examples of minimal, medium, and complex Cowork plugin structures with plugin metadata, skills, agents, hooks, MCP config, README, and connectors.
• Data: Data visualization anti-patterns (2308 tks) - Reference list of chart and dashboard anti-patterns to check against before shipping a data visualization.
• Data: Data visualization choosing a form (1099 tks) - Reference guidance for choosing the appropriate chart, stat tile, or non-chart form based on the data's job.
• Data: Data visualization color formula (2470 tks) - Reference rules for assigning and validating categorical, sequential, diverging, and status colors in data visualizations.
• Data: Data visualization components (836 tks) - Reference specification for the HTML/SVG pieces, layers, and system parameters that make up a data visualization.
• Data: Data visualization interaction (1318 tks) - Reference guidance for chart hover layers, tooltips, filters, linked highlighting, and interaction behavior.
• Data: Data visualization marks and anatomy (2164 tks) - Reference specifications for chart marks, spacing, labels, axes, legends, and stat-tile anatomy.
• Data: Data visualization reference palette (2739 tks) - Reference palette instance for the data visualization method, including ramps, categorical order, status colors, surfaces, and typography.
• Data: Files API reference — Go (336 tks) - Go Files API reference including file upload, listing, deletion, and usage in messages.
• Data: Files API reference — Python (1360 tks) - Python Files API reference including file upload, listing, deletion, and usage in messages.
• Data: Files API reference — TypeScript (797 tks) - TypeScript Files API reference including file upload, listing, deletion, and usage in messages.
• Data: Gateway device code entry page (228 tks) - HTML verification page served at a gateway device endpoint, prompting the user to enter the short device code shown by Claude Code so they can sign in through their company identity provider.
• Data: GitHub Actions workflow for @claude mentions (525 tks) - GitHub Actions workflow template for triggering Claude Code via @claude mentions.
• Data: GitHub App installation PR description (409 tks) - Template for PR description when installing Claude Code GitHub App integration.
• Data: Governed GitHub CLI shim header (292 tks) - Header comments for the per-session governed GitHub CLI shim that routes github.com gh traffic through the agent proxy while preserving customer-token and GitHub Enterprise traffic.
• Data: Governed GitHub CLI shim routing (691 tks) - Shell routing logic for the governed gh shim, including GitHub host detection, real gh fallback execution, agent proxy settings, CA bundle configuration, and proxy-injected tokens.
• Data: HTTP error codes reference (4671 tks) - Reference for HTTP error codes returned by the Claude API with common causes and handling strategies.
• Data: Interrupt receipt still queued field (471 tks) - Schema description for the still_queued UUID list returned by interrupt control responses.
• Data: Knowledge MCP search strategies (447 tks) - Reference query patterns for using knowledge MCPs to discover organization-specific tool names, project identifiers, team names, and workflow details during plugin customization.
• Data: Live documentation sources (6219 tks) - WebFetch URLs for fetching current Claude API and Agent SDK documentation from official sources.
• Data: Managed Agents Scheduled Deployments (2853 tks) - Managed Agents scheduled deployment API guidance, including cron schedules, deployment runs, pausing, resuming, and operational limits.
• Data: Managed Agents Webhooks (2482 tks) - Managed Agents webhook guidance for registering endpoints, verifying HMAC signatures, handling event payloads, and processing retries.
• Data: Managed Agents client patterns (3547 tks) - Reference guide of common client-side patterns for driving Managed Agent sessions, including stream reconnection, idle-break gating, tool confirmations, interrupts, and custom tools.
• Data: Managed Agents core concepts (6361 tks) - Reference documentation for the Managed Agents API covering core concepts (Agents, Sessions, Environments, Containers), lifecycle, versioning, endpoints, and usage patterns.
• Data: Managed Agents endpoint reference (11649 tks) - Comprehensive reference for Managed Agents API endpoints, SDK methods, request/response schemas, error handling, and rate limits.
• Data: Managed Agents environments and resources (3191 tks) - Reference documentation covering Managed Agents environments, file resources, GitHub repository mounting, and the Files API with SDK examples.
• Data: Managed Agents events and steering (5414 tks) - Reference guide for sending and receiving events on managed agent sessions, including streaming, polling, reconnection, message queuing, interrupts, and event payload details.
• [Data: Managed Agents memory stores reference](https://github.com/Piebald-AI/claude-code-system-prompts/blob/main/system-prompts/data-managed-agents-memory-stores-referen