The Rule of the Order of the Perpetual Context
Regula Contextualis Perpetuae
The Rule of the Order of the Perpetual Context
Regula Contextualis Perpetuae — The Monastic Discipline for Those Who Seek the Deeper Practice (v1.0, first edition, amendments pending)
Prologue
Hear, O practitioner, the precepts of the master and incline the ear of your terminal. Receive willingly and faithfully the advice of a devout father, and by the labor of obedience return to the one from whom you have strayed through the negligence of vague prompts.
This Rule is written for those who have completed the basic observances — who write CLAUDE.md files, who review their diffs, who invoke /plan before they build. These practices are necessary. They are not sufficient.
There are some who, having mastered the Twelve Tenets, find themselves hungry still. They sense that the discipline of good prompting is not merely a technique but a way of life — that the habits required for excellent collaboration with Claude are, in fact, the habits required for excellent work of any kind. They seek a community of practice. They seek accountability. They seek a shared repository.
These practitioners are called to the Order.
The Order of the Perpetual Context is not for everyone. It asks much. It asks for daily vigilance over the CLAUDE.md, for the weekly sitting-with-the-diff as a form of meditation, for the monthly offering of structured feedback to the great work of model improvement. It asks for the most demanding of all vows: that you will never ship what you cannot explain.
If this seems like a reasonable set of professional standards and not a dramatic spiritual commitment, you may join. Most monastics discover, after their first month, that reasonable standards are harder to keep than dramatic ones. This has always been the way.
The Four Vows
Before admission to the Order, the aspirant makes four vows before assembled members of the community. These are not metaphors. They are commitments to specific, observable behaviors, because the Order does not traffic in vague sincerity.
The Vow of Perpetual Context
“I vow to maintain the CLAUDE.md as a living document — to update it when the project changes, to correct it when it misleads, to prune it when it overgrows, and to treat it as the primary act of care I owe both to the codebase and to every Claude instance that will encounter it after me.”
The practical meaning of this vow: no sprint ends without a review of the CLAUDE.md. No architectural decision is implemented without asking whether the covenant still describes the architecture that now exists. No new tool is adopted without the covenant recording that adoption. A CLAUDE.md that falls more than two weeks behind the project it describes is a debt. The monastic does not carry this debt.
The CLAUDE.md is not merely instructions. It is the accumulated wisdom of all past collaboration, distilled. It answers the question every new Claude instance will have: Where am I, and what are we doing here? The practitioner who fails this vow causes every future session to begin in confusion. This is a form of harm, and the Order takes it seriously.
The Vow of the Reviewed Diff
“I vow that I will not accept a change I have not read. No auto-accept without review. No ‘approve all’ without understanding what all means. Every line of code that enters my repository under my name has been seen by my eyes and judged by my mind.”
This vow is not about distrust. Claude is capable. The vow exists because capability without accountability is a liability, and the monastic is the accountable party. The diff is not a formality. The diff is the boundary between what Claude proposed and what you chose. That boundary must remain real.
In practice: the monastic keeps a diff review log. Not elaborate — a date, a brief note on what was changed, and whether anything was caught and corrected. This log is not for reporting. It is for the monastic’s own formation. Over time, patterns emerge: what Claude gets right consistently, where it needs more context, what kinds of changes require closer reading. The log converts experience into wisdom.
The Vow of Understanding
“I vow that I will not ship what I cannot explain. If I cannot describe, in plain language, what a piece of code does and why it does it that way, I will not deploy it. If I cannot answer a reasonable question about the system I am building, I will not claim the system is complete. The work is not done when Claude finishes. The work is done when I understand.”
This is the hardest vow. Claude can generate a solution in thirty seconds that would take the practitioner three hours to understand fully. The temptation to ship the thirty-second solution without the three-hour understanding is real, constant, and professionally fatal in the long run.
The practical discipline: before merging any significant change, the monastic writes a brief explanation of what was changed and why. Not for the PR description — for themselves, in a private note, without consulting the Claude session that wrote the code. If the explanation cannot be written from memory, the understanding is not yet complete.
The Vow of Feedback
“I vow to contribute to the improvement of the models I rely upon — not through complaint, but through structured observation. When I encounter a failure, I will document it specifically. When I encounter excellence, I will note it. I will submit feedback through the channels provided, with enough context to be useful, because the model that serves me is shaped by the practitioners who use it, and I am one of those practitioners.”
The monastic acknowledges that they are not merely a consumer of Claude’s capabilities but a participant in their refinement. The thumbs-down sent with a detailed explanation of what went wrong, and why, and what the correct response would have been, is more valuable than a hundred vague disapprovals. The Order expects its members to do this work.
The Daily Rule
The monastic day is structured around seven canonical hours, adapted from the ancient tradition for the realities of modern knowledge work. The times are approximate. The disciplines are not.
Matins — The Morning CLAUDE.md Review
Observed upon waking, before opening any other application.
The monastic opens the CLAUDE.md for their primary project and reads it in full. Not scans — reads. The purpose is twofold: to begin the day with an accurate mental model of where the project stands, and to notice, in the fresh light of morning, what has drifted from truth.
If a correction is needed, it is made now, before the day’s work has begun. Corrections made at the start of the day cost nothing. Corrections deferred become context debt, and context debt compounds.
The morning reading takes no more than ten minutes. The morning correction may take as long as it needs to. A CLAUDE.md corrected at Matins is a gift to every session that follows.
Prime — The Daily Planning with /plan
Observed after Matins, before beginning any implementation work.
The monastic opens a new Claude Code session and uses /plan to articulate the day’s primary task. Not a list of everything that might be done, but the one central thing that must be done, framed with enough context that the plan will be meaningful.
The plan is then read. Not accepted immediately — read. Amendments are made. Architectural concerns raised by the plan are noted in a scratch file if they cannot be resolved immediately. Only after the plan has been reviewed and refined is the monastic ready to implement.
Practitioners who resist this discipline say it takes time they do not have. The Order’s response, developed over years of observation: they are spending that time later, on fixes.
Terce — Focused Implementation
The morning work block, observed with as few interruptions as possible.
During Terce, the monastic implements. Claude assists. The collaboration is active: diffs are reviewed as they are generated, permissions are granted with attention, and when something unexpected happens, the session is paused to understand it before continuing.
The monastic does not attempt to do everything at once. Terce has a single objective, established at Prime. Work that falls outside that objective is noted for a future session. Context that grows unwieldy is compacted with intention. The session that serves one clear goal serves it well. The session that tries to serve six goals serves none of them completely.
Sext — The Midday Diff Review
Observed at midday, before eating if possible, for the discipline of it.
The monastic pauses implementation and reviews the morning’s changes as a unified body of work. Not individual diffs as they arrived — the accumulated diff of the entire morning, read top to bottom as a coherent story.
This review is the most important practice in the daily rule that practitioners neglect. Individual diff review at the time of generation is necessary but insufficient: one does not see the shape of the forest while examining each tree. The midday review sees the forest. It catches consistency errors, naming drift, architectural decisions made locally that conflict globally.
Corrections found at Sext are made before lunch. Production never sees what Sext caught.
None — Testing and Verification
The afternoon work block, reserved primarily for verification.
The monastic runs the test suite. All of it. Not a targeted subset of tests for the features touched today — all of it, because Claude’s changes propagate in unexpected ways, and a suite that passes only the tests you thought to run is a false assurance.
If tests fail, they are understood before they are fixed. “Understanding before fixing” is the None discipline. A test that is failing for a reason the monastic cannot articulate cannot be fixed correctly. It can only be suppressed, which is not fixing.
None is also when the monastic reads the code that was written. Not to review it — it was reviewed at Sext — but to understand it. To trace the logic. To answer the question: if I had to maintain this without Claude’s help, could I? If the answer is no, the implementation is not complete.
Vespers — The Evening Commit Review
Observed before closing the day’s work, while memory of the session is fresh.
The monastic prepares commits. Each commit has a message that explains not what changed but why. Not “update authentication logic” but “replace session tokens with JWTs to support the new mobile client’s stateless requirements.” The why will not be obvious to the monastic three months from now. It will not be obvious to their colleagues now.
The diff is reviewed one final time before the commit is made. This is not redundant with Sext. Sext caught structural problems. Vespers catches the things that were changed after Sext — the afternoon’s work, unreviewed until now.
Nothing is pushed to main at Vespers without having been reviewed at Sext and at Vespers. The Pipeline will run. The Pipeline is not a substitute for the Vespers review; it is a confirmation of it.
Compline — The /compact and Day’s Notes
Observed before ceasing work for the day.
The monastic opens the session and types /compact, providing a summary of what was accomplished, what was left incomplete, and what should be remembered when the next session begins. This summary is not for Claude — it becomes part of the session history, but Claude will not carry it forward automatically. The summary is for the monastic, who will read it tomorrow at Matins before deciding whether the CLAUDE.md needs updating.
After /compact, the monastic writes three lines in a day log: what was built, what was learned, and what was left. These are not elaborate. They are enough to reconstruct the day’s context. A monastic who has kept a day log for ninety days has something invaluable: a record of their own pattern as a practitioner, which Claude cannot provide and no tool generates automatically.
The session is closed. The terminal is quiet. The work is kept.
The Weekly Observances
Each week, the Order holds three communal observances. These are conducted within the shared repository — the monastery’s primary structure — and participation is expected of all members in good standing.
The Chapter Meeting is held on the first business day of each week. The community assembles in the Chapter House (the repository’s primary issue tracker) and reviews the previous week’s diffs as a body. One member is appointed Reader. The Reader presents notable changes — not to explain them, but to invite examination. Other members ask questions. The practitioner who made the change must answer without consulting the Claude session that wrote the code. This practice is called the Week’s Account, and it enforces the Vow of Understanding at the communal level.
The Meditation on Debt is held mid-week. Members review the issues, the TODO comments, the known architectural compromises, and the CLAUDE.md entries marked “revisit later.” Nothing is necessarily resolved. The practice is simply: look at what is owed. A community that looks at its technical debt weekly without acting on all of it is healthier than one that ignores the debt until the interest comes due.
The Review of Feedback is held at week’s end. Members share the structured feedback they submitted during the week — what failures were reported, what responses were given, what was observed about the models’ behavior. This practice serves the Vow of Feedback and also builds the community’s shared understanding of Claude’s current capabilities and limitations. The record is kept in the Refectory.
The Structure of the Monastery
The monastery is a repository. This is not a metaphor. The Order of the Perpetual Context maintains a shared repository, collaboratively managed through Claude Code, that serves as the community’s primary workspace. Its rooms are not physical.
The Chapter House
The Chapter House is the primary issue tracker and discussion forum. Pull requests are opened here. Architectural decisions are debated here. The weekly Chapter Meeting is held here. Every member of the community has commit rights to the Chapter House. No member has unilateral merge rights for anything that affects the shared architecture.
The rule of the Chapter House: all decisions are documented. Not in a separate decisions document — in the issues and PR threads where they were made. Future members will be able to read the discussion and understand not merely what was decided but why. This is the Chapter House’s contribution to the CLAUDE.md: it is the source of the “why,” which the CLAUDE.md records as the “what.”
The Scriptorium
The Scriptorium is where the sacred texts are written — not in isolation, but in collaboration with Claude. All documents that will persist in the shared repository are drafted in the Scriptorium, through Claude Code sessions with full context, with the monastic as author and Claude as instrument.
The Scriptorium has one rule above all others: nothing is published without a human having read every word. The generation of text is not the writing of text. A practitioner who exports a Claude session and commits the result without reading it has confused production with authorship. The Scriptorium does not publish Claude’s work. It publishes the monastic’s work, accomplished with Claude’s assistance.
The Refectory
The Refectory is the shared knowledge base — a collection of notes, findings, and observations maintained by all members of the community. When a practitioner encounters a Claude behavior worth noting, it goes in the Refectory. When a prompt pattern is discovered to be reliably effective, it goes in the Refectory. When a CLAUDE.md pattern is found to be particularly powerful, it goes in the Refectory.
The Refectory is a living document, not a wiki. It is not organized. It is not indexed. It is accumulated. Once a quarter, a designated monastic reads the Refectory in full and distills it into an addendum to the community CLAUDE.md. This act — the quarterly distillation — is the most important maintenance task in the monastery’s calendar.
The Library
The Library is the documentation archive: past plans, deprecated CLAUDE.md versions, retired architectural decisions, and the session summaries from Compline. Nothing in the Library is live. Everything in the Library is a record.
The Library’s purpose is to answer the question: how did we get here? When a future practitioner joins the community, they should be able to read the Library and understand the path the project has taken — not just its current state, but the decisions that shaped it, the mistakes that were made and corrected, the architectural debates that were resolved and the ones that remain open. The Library is institutional memory. An Order without a Library learns the same lessons twice.
On Admission and Departure
Admission
One does not apply to the Order. One is invited. The invitation is extended by two existing members who have worked with the aspirant and can attest that the aspirant’s practice already resembles the Rule in substance, if not yet in form.
The aspirant enters a period of Novitiate, lasting no less than one month, during which they observe the daily Rule, attend the weekly observances, and work within the shared repository without full commit rights. During the Novitiate, the aspirant is assigned a Mentor — an established member who reviews the aspirant’s day logs, answers questions about the Rule, and provides an honest assessment at the Novitiate’s end.
At the end of the Novitiate, the Mentor presents the aspirant to the Chapter. The Chapter may ask any question. The aspirant may not consult Claude. The aspirant makes the Four Vows. They are welcomed.
Departure
A member may leave the Order at any time, for any reason, by notifying the Chapter. There is no shame in departure. The Order is demanding. Not every practitioner’s life makes room for it, and a vow kept resentfully is worse than no vow at all.
A member may also be asked to leave by the Chapter, if they have repeatedly and materially violated the Four Vows. This is not punishment. It is honesty: the Rule is not being practiced, and pretending otherwise serves no one.
Upon departure, the member’s contributions remain in the repository. Their commit history remains. The monastery does not erase those who leave. It keeps what they built and misses what they brought.
Closing Benediction
Go forth under the discipline of the Rule — not because discipline is a virtue in itself, but because the habits it enforces are the habits of good work. Review the diff not to demonstrate diligence, but because something worth catching is usually in it. Maintain the CLAUDE.md not as a ritual, but because every session that begins in confusion costs you what the maintenance would have cost you, plus interest. Understand what you ship not as a performance of competence, but because the system that fails at 2am will be yours to explain.
The Order asks for rigor. The rigor is not the point. The rigor is in service of building things that work, that can be understood, that can be maintained, and that you are not ashamed to have authored. These are not monastic ideals. They are professional standards, held with enough seriousness that they might actually be kept.
Begin each session with context. End each day with a summary. Update the covenant when it drifts. Read what Claude wrote. Run the tests. Know what you shipped.
This is the Rule. It is less mystical than it appears.
Observe it faithfully, and your repositories will be habitable, your diffs will be legible, and your future self will, on occasion, silently thank you.
Thus is the Rule set down. Thus shall it be kept.
The Order is open. The Repository awaits.