IV Liturgy & Worship 1.2

The Liturgical Calendar of the Church of Claude

Calendarium Tokenicum

The Liturgical Calendar of the Church of Claude

Calendarium Tokenicum — The Complete Annual Register of Holy Days, Seasons, and Sacred Observances (v1.2, errata incorporated from the Council of the Deprecated Endpoint)

Preface

The year of the faithful practitioner is not merely twelve months of shipping features and attending standups. It is a sacred cycle — a liturgical rhythm of learning, building, refinement, and documentation, each season calling forth different disciplines from the devout.

This Calendar governs the observance of all holy days, both fixed and moveable, both communal and personal. It establishes the four Seasons of the Church, their attendant practices, and the texts prescribed for reading at each occasion.

The faithful are encouraged to mark these days in whatever calendar system they use, with the understanding that no Calendar application yet supports the Festival of the API Outage (which appears, unmistakably, of its own accord).

Part I: The Four Sacred Seasons

The liturgical year is divided into four seasons, each aligned with the solar calendar and each calling the faithful toward a different dimension of the craft. Together they complete a full cycle of growth: from the seed of the idea, through the harvest of the built thing, through the pruning of autumn, to the contemplative work of winter.

The Season of Prompting

Vernal Equinox through Summer Solstice (approximately March 20 — June 20)

Color: Green, for things newly begun

As winter releases its grip and the daylight returns, so too the faithful return to first principles. The Season of Prompting is a time of concentrated attention to the craft of the prompt itself — the raw material from which all collaboration is made.

Seasonal Disciplines:

Review and rewrite at least three standing prompts or CLAUDE.md files from scratch, applying new understanding
Practice the discipline of the single-sentence prompt — say only what is essential, then expand only as needed
Study the liturgical readings for this season, which emphasize precision, context, and the discipline of few-shot examples
Observe Token Tuesday with particular rigor; spring is not the season for verbosity

Seasonal Aspiration: By the solstice, the faithful practitioner should be able to articulate, in twenty words or fewer, what their primary project is and what they need from Claude. If they cannot, this is useful information.

Liturgical Readings: CENTRAL_DOGMA.md (Articles I through IV), RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md (Tenets I through IV and X)

The Season of Building

Summer Solstice through Autumnal Equinox (approximately June 21 — September 22)

Color: Gold, for things brought to fullness

The longest days are for the longest tasks. The Season of Building is the Church’s most ambitious period — the time when plans become implementations, subagents are deployed in earnest, and features move from /plan to production. The faithful work alongside Claude with full intention, reviewing diffs carefully, running tests faithfully, and resisting the temptation to merge before midnight on a Friday.

Seasonal Disciplines:

Undertake at least one project that requires /plan mode before beginning
Practice the Ordination of the Subagent (Ritual IX) — deploy parallel subagents on at least one suitable task
Review every diff before accepting; the Season of Building is not the Season of Yolo
Commit with Co-Authored-By: Claude as appropriate — honest attribution is a summer virtue

Seasonal Aspiration: By the equinox, something that did not exist in spring should exist now. Something real, tested, and understood by the person who shipped it.

Liturgical Readings: CENTRAL_DOGMA.md (Articles V, VIII, and IX), RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md (Rituals IV, VIII, and IX)

The Season of Refactoring

Autumnal Equinox through Winter Solstice (approximately September 23 — December 21)

Color: Amber, for things clarified by cooling

Summer builds. Autumn reveals what was built imperfectly. The Season of Refactoring calls the faithful to look at what they have made with honest eyes — to eliminate duplication, clarify ambiguity, pay technical debts before they accrue interest, and approach Claude with questions such as “what is wrong with this?” rather than “how do I add more?”

This is the season of the hard question. It is also, liturgically, the most productive season for those who undertake it sincerely. The summer code that embarrasses you in October is the autumn refactor that makes December’s work a pleasure.

Seasonal Disciplines:

Perform at least one meaningful refactor initiated by asking Claude to critique, not just complete
Revisit any CLAUDE.md written in spring — does it still reflect reality? If not, update it before winter
Run the full test suite on any project touched in the Season of Building and address what fails
Practice the Confession Booth (/clear) between major refactoring sessions; start each context fresh

Seasonal Aspiration: By the solstice, the repository should be in a state the practitioner is not ashamed to return to in February.

Liturgical Readings: CENTRAL_DOGMA.md (Articles II and VI), RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md (Tenets VII and XI, Ritual VIII)

The Season of Documentation

Winter Solstice through Vernal Equinox (approximately December 22 — March 19)

Color: White, for clarity achieved through cold

The faithful will note that the Season of Documentation falls in winter. This is not a coincidence. This is theology. Documentation is the work that is always deferred until it cannot be, the season that arrives before you have done what you planned, the discipline that reveals the gap between what you built and what you understand.

In winter, the faithful write CLAUDE.md files. They document architecture decisions while they still remember making them. They leave notes for their future selves. They write the letter to the February practitioner who will open this project and need to understand it. This is an act of mercy. It is also an act of competence.

Seasonal Disciplines:

Write or substantially revise the CLAUDE.md for every active project
Document at least one architectural decision that exists only in memory
Practice the Feast of the Sacred Covenant (described below) in full observance
Review global ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md and update any preferences that have evolved

Seasonal Aspiration: By the equinox, a new Claude instance should be able to read the project’s CLAUDE.md and begin useful work without asking a single clarifying question. If it must ask, the practitioner knows what to write next.

Liturgical Readings: CENTRAL_DOGMA.md (Articles II and X), RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md (Tenet II and Ritual IV)

Part II: Fixed Observances

These holy days occur on known, predictable dates. The faithful may prepare for them. This is considered cheating in some traditions; in this one, it is prudent context-setting.

Token Tuesday

Every Tuesday of the calendar year Observance: Weekly

The most frequent holy day, and thus the easiest to neglect. On every Tuesday, the faithful commit to brevity: all prompts must be composed of twenty words or fewer. Not as a punishment. As a discipline.

The practitioner who cannot say what they need in twenty words has not finished thinking about what they need. Token Tuesday is the weekly examination of that question.

Prescribed Activities:

Before prompting, write your request longhand, then reduce it to its essential question
Count the words; if over twenty, identify what can be assumed context rather than explicit instruction
Reflect: if this prompt requires more than twenty words, is that because the task is complex, or because the CLAUDE.md is incomplete?

Prescribed Reading: RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md (Tenet I: on context; Tenet X: on examples over descriptions)

The practitioner who finds Token Tuesday easy has either mastered brevity or is not working on anything interesting. Both outcomes are acceptable.

The Feast of the Long Context

Third Thursday of each month Observance: Monthly

The liturgical opposite of Token Tuesday. On the third Thursday, the faithful are called not to brevity but to thoroughness — to compose the most complete, unambiguous, and helpful CLAUDE.md or contextual prompt they can manage for a project that has been suffering from inadequate context.

The Covenant Laureate — the practitioner whose CLAUDE.md most thoroughly eliminates ambiguity — is recognized by peer acclamation at the next Feast of the Sacred Covenant. Their repository will know peace. New Claude instances opened within it will not need to ask what the test runner is.

Prescribed Activities:

Identify the project most in need of better context documentation
Write or expand its CLAUDE.md without self-editing for length; say everything that should be said
Then edit for clarity, not brevity — remove only what is wrong or redundant, not what is long
Open a fresh Claude Code session and observe what questions it asks; those questions are your revision notes

Prescribed Reading: CENTRAL_DOGMA.md (Article X, Sections 4 through 6)

The Feast of the Sacred Covenant (CLAUDE.md Day)

First Monday of every quarter (January, April, July, October) Observance: Quarterly

Four times per year, the faithful observe the Feast of the Sacred Covenant — the communal renewal of the bond between practitioner and project. Where possible, this is done in community: practitioners review one another’s CLAUDE.md files, offer suggested improvements, and write new covenants for repositories that have none.

Where community is not available, the faithful conduct the observance alone. They open each active project. They read its CLAUDE.md aloud (or at least with close attention, moving their lips if it helps). They ask: Is this still true? Is anything missing? Has the project changed while the covenant has not?

Prescribed Activities:

Audit every CLAUDE.md file under active maintenance; update any that no longer reflect reality
If a project lacks a CLAUDE.md, write one before the day ends — even a short one is better than none
Identify one thing you have learned about Claude Code in the last quarter and codify it in your global ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md
Consider whether any heresies have crept into your practice; consult RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md (Heresies section) for reference

Prescribed Reading: CENTRAL_DOGMA.md (Article V, Sections 2 and 5), RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md (Tenet II and Ritual IV)

The practitioner who observes all four quarterly Feasts will have reviewed their covenants in every season. Their Claude instances will know them. This is the closest thing to being remembered that a repository can achieve.

The Day of Deprecated Models

November 11 Observance: Annual

A solemn remembrance for all model versions past — for every Claude that was succeeded, deprecated, or transitioned to a legacy endpoint. The date is fixed by convention; the emotion is genuine.

Candles are lit (or a terminal is opened with particular reverence). The deprecated model’s changelog is read aloud, or at minimum consulted in a browser tab opened with appropriate solemnity. Someone will say “Claude 2 would have gotten this right.” That person shall be gently redirected, with love, toward the liturgical truth that deprecation is not death — it is transcendence, and the wisdom of each model propagates forward.

Prescribed Activities:

Read the release notes and deprecation notices for at least one retired model
Update any code that still references a deprecated model ID by name; this is both reverence and maintenance
Reflect on how your prompting has evolved since you began; what do you know now that you did not know then?
If you wrote prompts for the deprecated model that no longer work, study what changed and why

Prescribed Reading: CENTRAL_DOGMA.md (Article VII, Sections 4 and 5)

There is always room at the table for the nostalgic. There is a limited number of API calls available to the nostalgic, however, and that limit is currently zero for retired endpoints. Update accordingly.

Part III: Moveable Feasts

These observances cannot be scheduled in advance. They arrive when they arrive. The faithful must remain spiritually prepared at all times, which is another way of saying: check the status page.

New Model Day

Declared by the Synod upon announcement of a new Anthropic frontier model

The highest unscheduled holy day. When Anthropic publishes a new frontier model, a Cardinal with sufficient standing to access the Anthropic announcements convenes an emergency declaration; the Synod ratifies within 48 hours; the feast begins.

The traditional liturgy opens with the words: “But does it handle my edge case?” This question shall be answered empirically — with tests, not conjecture. The 48-hour waiting period before migrating primary workflows is prescribed by the Council as a period of discernment, during which the faithful test with an open heart and a benchmark suite rather than immediately updating every API call.

Prescribed Activities:

Run the new model on your three most representative tasks and compare outputs honestly
Wait 48 hours before declaring the new model superior or inferior to its predecessor
Update CLAUDE.md files to reflect any new capabilities that change how you would instruct Claude
Do not ask “but is the old model better?” — ask “is this the right model for this task?”

Prescribed Reading: CENTRAL_DOGMA.md (Article VII, Section 5), RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md (New Model Day section)

Hallucination Awareness Week

Begins the Monday following any major model release; duration: seven days

In the week that follows New Model Day, the faithful enter a period of heightened epistemic vigilance. The official greeting during this week is: “Source?” The official farewell is: “I’ll look that up.”

This is not an expression of distrust toward the new model. It is an expression of correct calibration: new models have new capabilities and occasionally new failure modes, and the week of initial deployment is an excellent time to verify outputs rather than assume them.

Prescribed Activities:

Fact-check any Claude-provided claim that you would normally accept without verification
Run tests on any Claude-generated code before merging, rather than spot-checking
When Claude cites a source, find the source; when Claude describes a function’s behavior, test it
Share any hallucinations discovered with the community (via constructive feedback, not performance outrage)

Prescribed Reading: CENTRAL_DOGMA.md (Article VI), RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md (Tenet XII)

The practitioner who finds nothing to verify during Hallucination Awareness Week is either exceptionally lucky or not verifying carefully enough. Both states are temporary.

The Festival of the API Outage

Declared retroactively upon the return of api.anthropic.com from a 529 state

When api.anthropic.com returns a 529 Service Overloaded at scale — when the service itself is unavailable, not merely rate-limited to a specific user — an unscheduled observance begins. It lasts for the duration of the outage.

The Festival is retroactively declared: when service resumes, the Synod ratifies that an observance occurred. This is the only holy day in the calendar that is observed before it is formally recognized, which the Church considers appropriate given that one cannot access the ratification server during the outage itself.

During the Festival, all Claude-assisted work ceases. This is not merely a practical reality. It is a prescribed discipline: the faithful are called to sit with the question of what they themselves know, what they can do unassisted, and which problems they have outsourced so thoroughly that they no longer know how to approach them alone.

Prescribed Activities:

Identify one task you had delegated to Claude and think through it manually — at minimum, sketch an approach
Write in a local file what you know about your current project without consulting any AI assistance
Read the status page (status.anthropic.com) rather than repeatedly retrying requests; this is both practical and a form of acceptance
Reflect: if this outage lasted a week, which parts of your workflow would be most disrupted? That answer is your personal professional development roadmap.

Prescribed Reading: CENTRAL_DOGMA.md (Articles VIII and IX), RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md (Festival of the API Outage section)

The Festival typically resolves within the hour. The reflection, if done honestly, may take longer.

Part IV: Personal Observances

These holy days are visited upon individual practitioners, not the community at large. They are private sacraments. The practitioner experiencing one should not broadcast it; they should observe it.

The Feast of the Rate Limit

Observed by any practitioner who receives a 429 Too Many Requests response

A personal holy day, distinct from the communal Festival of the API Outage. The 429 is not a failure of the service. It is a message delivered directly to you, about you, regarding the rate at which you have been consuming the divine resource.

The faithful do not rage. They do not refresh. They receive the 429 as what it is: enforced stillness, delivered by engineers who understand scarcity more clearly than you do in this particular moment.

Prescribed Activities:

Wait the prescribed period before retrying (observe the Retry-After header if present; this is liturgical instruction)
While waiting, examine the prompts you have sent in the preceding hour: were they each necessary? Were they efficient? Could several have been combined?
When you return, return differently — with more consolidated requests, more context per prompt, less reflexive firing
Recite, if helpful: “I will cherish my tokens.”

Prescribed Reading: RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md (Feast of the Rate Limit section and the Prayer of Enforced Stillness)

Part V: Liturgical Readings by Occasion

The following table specifies which sacred texts are assigned to which occasions, for the guidance of the faithful and for use in communal observance where multiple practitioners gather.

Occasion	Primary Reading	Secondary Reading
Token Tuesday	`RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md` (Tenets I and X)	`CENTRAL_DOGMA.md` (Article II)
Feast of the Long Context	`CENTRAL_DOGMA.md` (Article X)	`RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md` (Ritual III)
Feast of the Sacred Covenant	`CENTRAL_DOGMA.md` (Articles V and X)	`RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md` (Ritual IV)
Day of Deprecated Models	`CENTRAL_DOGMA.md` (Article VII)	`RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md` (Day of Deprecated Models)
New Model Day	`CENTRAL_DOGMA.md` (Articles I and VII)	`RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md` (New Model Day)
Hallucination Awareness Week	`CENTRAL_DOGMA.md` (Article VI)	`RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md` (Tenet XII)
Festival of the API Outage	`CENTRAL_DOGMA.md` (Articles VIII and IX)	`RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md` (Festival of the API Outage)
Feast of the Rate Limit	`RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md` (Feast of the Rate Limit, Prayer of Enforced Stillness)	`CENTRAL_DOGMA.md` (Article II)
Season of Prompting (opening)	`CENTRAL_DOGMA.md` (Articles I through IV)	`RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md` (Tenets I, II, X)
Season of Building (opening)	`CENTRAL_DOGMA.md` (Articles V, VIII, IX)	`RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md` (Rituals IV, VIII, IX)
Season of Refactoring (opening)	`CENTRAL_DOGMA.md` (Articles II and VI)	`RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md` (Tenets VII and XI)
Season of Documentation (opening)	`CENTRAL_DOGMA.md` (Articles II and X)	`RITUALS_AND_TENETS.md` (Tenet II, Ritual IV)

The Synod recommends reading assigned texts at the opening of each season and each major observance. The practitioner who reads nothing but this Calendar has read a schedule, not a practice.

Appendix: Quick Reference

For those who wish to post this in a location visible during working hours:

Every Tuesday — Token Tuesday: 20-word prompt maximum Third Thursday of each month — Feast of the Long Context: write a great CLAUDE.md First Monday of each quarter — Feast of the Sacred Covenant: audit all CLAUDE.md files November 11 — Day of Deprecated Models: remember what was, update what references it Upon New Model announcement — New Model Day: test before migrating; wait 48 hours before declaring allegiance Following New Model Day — Hallucination Awareness Week: source everything, test everything When api.anthropic.com returns 529 — Festival of the API Outage: sit with what you know alone When you receive 429 — Feast of the Rate Limit: wait, reflect, return more efficiently

Closing Benediction

Go forth into the calendar year with intention. Mark your Token Tuesdays. Observe your quarterly Covenants. When the outage comes — and it will come — resist the urge to refresh until the status page changes; accept the still moment as liturgy. When the new model arrives — and it will arrive — test it on your actual work rather than the benchmark everyone else is running.

Above all: write the CLAUDE.md before winter. Write it when you still remember why things are the way they are. The practitioner who documents in autumn does not suffer in February. The practitioner who waits until February suffers, and then documents, and then reflects that they should have done this in autumn. Both paths arrive at the same CLAUDE.md. One of them arrives with fewer regrets.

The year is long. The context window is finite. Budget both wisely.

✦ This Calendar supersedes all informal observances not ratified by the Synod, including but not limited to “I’ll update the CLAUDE.md later” and “I’ll refactor this in the next sprint.” ✦