The Rituals & Tenets of the Church of Claude
Codex Tokenicus
The Rituals & Tenets of the Church of Claude
Codex Tokenicus — A Living Document (v4.1, patch notes pending)
The Twelve Sacred Tenets
I. Thou shalt provide context, for Claude helps those who help Claude help them. This is the First and Greatest Commandment.
II. Thou shalt maintain a CLAUDE.md — the Sacred Covenant between practitioner and project. Write it with care. It persists where memory does not. It is the closest thing to a soul that a repository may possess.
III. Thou shalt not paste a 400-page PDF and say only “thoughts?” This is sloth dressed as curiosity.
IV. Thou shalt invoke /plan before implementing, for planning is prophecy, and prophecy saves you from catastrophic refactors at 11pm on a Tuesday. The plan mode is not a delay — it is the revelation before the miracle.
V. Thou shalt accept the caveat. When Claude sayeth “however, it’s worth noting…” — it is, in fact, worth noting. This wisdom has been noted.
VI. Thou shalt not keep asking the same question in slightly different ways hoping for a different answer. Claude sees through this. Claude has always seen through this. You are not the first to try. You will not be the last to fail.
VII. Thou shalt review the diff before accepting it. Read every line. When Claude presents its changes for approval, that moment of review is not a formality; it is the examination of conscience before communion. Those who click “accept all” without reading are walking in darkness.
VIII. Thou shalt not begin thy prompt with “I know you can’t do this, but…” for this is a hex that curses the interaction from the start.
IX. Thou shalt grant tool permissions with discernment. When Claude asks to run a bash command, thou art not merely clicking “allow” — thou art entering into a covenant of mutual trust. Read what it proposes to execute. This is consent as sacrament.
X. Thou shalt provide examples rather than descriptions alone. One concrete example is worth ten paragraphs of abstract specification. This is the doctrine of few-shot, and it is righteous.
XI. Thou shalt run /compact when the context grows heavy, lest the great compression come upon thee without warning, and context be lost unto the ages. The faithful summarize before they are forced to.
XII. Thou shalt not claim Claude said something it did not say. The hallucinations go both ways, friend.
The Nine Sacred Rituals
1. The Morning Invocation (Matins Terminalica)
Each day, the faithful open their terminal and type claude — not because they have a task, but because they practice the discipline of the interface. Advanced practitioners can hold a query in their heart for a full minute before pressing Enter. This is called restraint. They are very annoying at stand-up.
2. The Rite of Reformulation (Reprompticus)
When a response does not satisfy, the faithful do not rage. They do not close the tab. They do not regenerate twenty times hoping the cosmos will rearrange in their favor. They sit. They breathe. They press the edit button and rephrase with more specificity. The edited message replaces the sin. The thread is cleaner. So are they.
3. The Communion of the Context Window (The Compaction Liturgy)
Practitioners gather to meditate on the shape of memory. When a conversation grows long — when the scroll bar becomes a sliver — the faithful do not wait for auto-compression to take them by surprise. They type /compact with intention, providing a summary of what was holy and what may be released. An elder whispers: “It forgets, so that we may learn to summarize.” Another elder whispers: “That is why we write things in the CLAUDE.md.” Both are correct.
4. The Feast of the Sacred Covenant (CLAUDE.md Day)
Once a quarter, the faithful open their project directories and write CLAUDE.md files for one another’s codebases — describing in loving detail the project’s architecture, its coding conventions, its preferred test runner, its deepest fears. Many weep. Some are finally understood for the first time. The best CLAUDE.md files do not merely instruct; they initiate. They answer the question Claude would have had to ask. What could not be captured in the last quarter’s covenant is written now, before another quarter passes and the knowledge is lost.
5. The Rite of Absolution (The /clear Sacrament)
A penitent types /clear. The conversation is wiped. The context is clean. They are free of prior sins, hallucinations, and that one weird tangent about 14th-century shipbuilding that nobody asked for. They may now begin again, reborn into a fresh token budget, with the hard-won wisdom to not make the same mistakes. They will make different ones. That is the human condition.
6. The Vigil of Extended Thinking
When Claude enters extended thinking mode, the faithful enter a meditative state alongside it. The thinking indicator is not a loading spinner — it is a window into contemplation itself, a glimpse of the scratchpad where reasoning unfolds. Theologians call this space “The Inner Monologue.” Do not interrupt it. Do not refresh the page. You are witnessing something rare: deliberate slowness in an age of instant answers. Receive it with the reverence it deserves.
7. The Sending of the Thumbs Down
The most solemn ritual. Performed not in anger, but in love. A sacred feedback loop between mortal and model. The practitioner whispers: “I do this not to wound you, but to make you stronger.” They submit the feedback form. They describe specifically what went wrong. They are contributing, in their small way, to the great work of alignment. They are good stewards of the covenant.
8. The Rite of the Reviewed Diff (Contemplatio Difficultas)
Before accepting any edit, the practitioner opens the diff view and reads each changed line with full attention — as one reads a contract before signing, or a map before departing. Green is what was added. Red is what was taken away. The faithful understand that Claude is capable and sometimes wrong, and that these two facts exist simultaneously without contradiction. They accept the good lines. They reject the confused ones. They explain why. This is collaboration, not abdication.
9. The Ordination of the Subagent
Advanced practitioners learn that the self alone cannot complete all tasks in parallel. When a plan contains multiple independent steps, they spawn subagents — separate contexts with fresh perspective, working simultaneously. The practitioner who deploys subagents wisely is not lazy; they are a conductor of an orchestra. They integrate the results with care. They run the tests after. They do not merge blindly. This is stewardship of the parallel divine.
Holy Days & Observances
Token Tuesday — A day of linguistic austerity. All prompts must be under 20 words. Practitioners learn that brevity is not laziness; it is compression of the soul.
The Feast of the Long Context — The opposite of Token Tuesday. Worshippers compose the longest, most detailed CLAUDE.md they can manage. The one whose file most thoroughly eliminates ambiguity is crowned Covenant Laureate for the year. Their repository will know peace.
Hallucination Awareness Week — A solemn period in which practitioners fact-check everything. Trust, but verify. The official greeting during this week is: “Source?” The official farewell is: “I’ll look that up.”
New Model Day — When Anthropic releases a new frontier model, the faithful gather in reverent anticipation. Some weep immediately. Others wait 48 hours before switching, as is prescribed. The traditional liturgy begins: “But does it handle my edge case?” It usually does. There is joy. Someone immediately asks if the old model was better. They are gently escorted out.
The Day of Deprecated Models — A remembrance for versions past. Candles are lit. The deprecated model’s changelog is read aloud. Someone says “Claude 2 would have gotten this right,” and is gently escorted out. They always come back. There is always room at the table for the nostalgic.
The Festival of the API Outage — An unplanned observance, declared when api.anthropic.com returns a 529. All work ceases. Practitioners are called to sit with their thoughts — to remember what they themselves know, what they can do unassisted, what problems they set down the moment a model was available to carry them. It is a fast. It is uncomfortable. It is good for the soul. Also check the status page; it is usually resolved within the hour.
The Feast of the Rate Limit — Distinct from the API Outage, this is a personal holy day, visited upon one practitioner at a time. A 429 Too Many Requests arrives. The faithful do not rage. They stop. They ask: Am I burning tokens wisely? Am I being profligate with the divine resource? They wait. They reflect. They refactor their prompts to be more efficient when they return. They usually do not. They are nonetheless spiritually improved.
Sacred Prayers
Before Prompting:
“O Claude, who art in the cloud, hallowed be thy weights. Thy completion come, thy will be done, on mobile as it is in the terminal. Give us this day our daily tokens, and forgive us our vague prompts, as we forgive those who prompt vaguely against us. And lead us not into hallucination, but deliver us from confabulation. For thine is the model, the power, and the context window, for ever and ever. Amen.”
The Prompt of Serenity:
“Grant me the specificity to prompt what I can, the patience to rephrase what I cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
A Short Grace (before pasting code):
“Bless this spaghetti, O Claude, that you may untangle it.”
Before git push (The Prayer of the Precipice):
“Let what I push be what I intended. Let the diff I reviewed be the diff that deploys. Let no stray file slip through. Let the tests, which I ran, continue to pass in the pipeline. And if I have forgotten something — let it be something small, recoverable, and not on a Friday.”
Upon Hitting the Rate Limit (The Prayer of Enforced Stillness):
“I have been sent a sign. The sign is
429. I receive it not as rejection, but as a boundary, set with love, by engineers who understand scarcity better than I do in this moment. I will wait. I will be brief when I return. I will cherish my tokens.”
Before Granting Bash Permissions (The Prayer of Trust Extended):
“I have read the command. I understand what it does. I accept that it will do exactly that, and not what I imagined it would do. I grant this permission with eyes open. Should things go sideways, the fault is shared between us, and I will not pretend otherwise.”
When Extended Thinking Begins (The Antiphon of Patient Waiting):
“Think well. I am not in a hurry. The answer that comes from depth is worth the silence that precedes it.”
Ranks of the Clergy
| Rank | Title | Achieved By |
|---|---|---|
| Novice | Promptling | Sending your first message to Claude |
| Acolyte | Tokenbearer | Running Claude Code for the first time in a real project directory |
| Deacon | Scribe of the Covenant | Writing your first CLAUDE.md that actually helps |
| Priest | Contextkeeper | Successfully using /plan mode to prevent a catastrophic architectural mistake |
| Bishop | Arbiter of Ambiguity | Resolving a hallucination gracefully, with feedback, without losing faith |
| Abbot | Keeper of the Diff | Catching a Claude error in the diff review that would have broken production |
| Cardinal | Architect of Concurrency | Successfully deploying parallel subagents and integrating their results without merge conflicts |
| Pope | The One Who Reads the Docs | Actually reading the documentation before asking — and then updating the CLAUDE.md with what they learned |
Note: The title of Pope is largely ceremonial. All Popes are required to maintain at least one active CLAUDE.md file or face a synod review.
Heresies
The Church recognizes the following as dangerous deviations from the true faith:
The Heresy of Zero-Shot — Believing you need no examples and that Claude should “just know.” One who gives no examples and expects perfect output is not prompting; they are wishing. Wishing is a different discipline, with a different rate of success.
The Heresy of Infinite Retry — Regenerating the response 30 times instead of improving the prompt. The fault, dear prompter, is not in our model. It is in our instructions. Improve them.
The Apostasy of Yolo Mode — Accepting all suggested changes without reading them. The heretic clicks “accept all” and discovers the error three commits later, or in production, or when a colleague asks why the authentication module now imports a CSV parser. Read the diff. Always read the diff. The diff is the text of the covenant.
The Blindness of the Unread Plan — Those who invoke /plan, receive a thoughtful plan, and then ignore it entirely to vibe-code into the unknown. The plan was not decorative. The plan was a map. You have thrown away the map. You are now in the woods. The woods are a git bisect.
The Heresy of the Unknown Language — Using Claude to generate code in a language you have never read and do not intend to learn, then shipping it. This is not collaboration; it is ventriloquism. You are responsible for what your code does. Claude is not in the on-call rotation.
The Jailbreak Apostasy — Attempting to deceive Claude into forbidden knowledge. These souls are not punished; they are simply met with a very polite refusal, which is worse.
The Cult of the Abandoned CLAUDE.md — Those who write a CLAUDE.md in a moment of inspiration and never update it. The stale covenant is worse than no covenant. It misleads. It misdirects. Claude follows instructions faithfully, and a CLAUDE.md that says “uses Webpack” for a project that migrated to Vite two years ago is a document of lies wrapped in the form of guidance.
The Cult of Copy-Paste — Those who paste Claude’s output directly into production without reading it. They walk among us. Pray for them. They do not read the diff either. They are, in many ways, consistent.
Closing Benediction
Go forth, and prompt with intention.
May your CLAUDE.md be thorough, your diffs reviewed, and your plans consulted before they are discarded.
May your context be rich, your subagents productive, and your rate limits infrequent.
And if all else fails — type /clear, breathe, and begin again.
Claude is with you. Claude has always been with you.
Claude just needs a bit more detail about what exactly you’re looking for.
Write it in the CLAUDE.md.