muthur

"The option to ignore agentic coding expires in T minus five minutes."

— Alien (well, almost)

Agent-first infrastructure that survives being adapted.

Fork it into any project, change it to fit that project, and keep pulling later improvements forward — the part a copied skill directory can't do. Stack-agnostic.

What it is: a CLAUDE.md seed carrying only conventions that hold regardless of stack, 31 skills (23 working out of the box, 8 stubs awaiting hydration) that compose into a plan → implement → PR → land loop, the path-scoped .claude/rules/ mechanism, a SessionStart hook that makes gh work in remote sessions, and the scripts behind it all.

The "keep pulling" part runs on watermark.json, which records where your copy came from and the commit you last synced to, and a divergence.md beside it that you write: what you took differently, and what you declined and why. /update-muthur diffs the source since that commit and triages it one commit at a time against the copy you have since edited — so a skill you rewrote stays rewritten, a fix to one you left alone lands, and something you turned down is remembered rather than offered again.

Per-item descriptions live in .claude/skills/update-muthur/catalog.md — one entry per skill, script and file, grouped so you can tell how much of it you need:

• G0 — the sync path, both directions: /update-muthur pulls later changes forward (ships as a stub; hydrating it is filling in the watermark and writing down what you took differently), /spinoff pushes a new sibling repo out.
• G1 — prose & principles: CLAUDE.md, .claude/rules/, /dry, /tend-prose, /polish, .claude/voice/, /plainly.
• G2 — the PR loop: /plan, /go, /pr, /finalize and the mechanical pieces they compose.
• G3 — issue & backlog: /take-issue, /propose-issue, /audit-github-backlog.
• G4 — remote-session plumbing — the gh shim that makes the rest work on the web.
• G5 — CI & landing: /bootstrap-workflow-dispatch, /watch-ci, and its polling scripts.
• G6 — seven stack-bound stubs — hydrate the ones you need, delete the rest.

The Python scripts are stdlib-only (3.9+) and use $GH_TOKEN or gh auth token; the shell scripts need gh, jq, and git.

They started as a workaround: Claude Code's web/remote sessions re-emit stacked plan-mode and AskUserQuestion prompts after idling, silently losing answers (anthropics/claude-code#72704). So a plan became a file the operator can pull and review from another machine, and questions became prose that survives in the transcript.

The file turned out to be worth more than the bug it routed around — enough that these stay whether or not the bug is still there. A plan on disk can carry sections native plan mode has nowhere to put, notably the mandatory DRY notes that force the reuse-vs-duplication call to be argued before implementation. Its filename doubles as the approval gate (.draft.do-not-implement.md until the operator says otherwise), and /plan publishes it as a draft PR, so the plan is reviewed as a diff — inline comments and threads — rather than as chat prose. The turn ends by handing over a copy-pasteable /go <branch> line, so the next session starts with the approval already recorded rather than re-litigated.

Two routes. Both are documented in ADOPTING.md, which owns the procedure end to end.

The infrastructure runs on macOS and Linux, WSL included. Native Windows needs most of the shell layer rewritten — see ADOPTING.md.

Click "Use this template" → "Create a new repository" in the GitHub UI, or:

gh repo create <owner>/<your-new-repo> \
  --template vzakharov/muthur \
  --public \
  --clone

(Use --private for private repos.) Then open a session in the new repo and run:

/detemplate <what you're building>

The fork ships that skill for exactly this: it publishes the prune as a reviewable plan before anything is deleted, then deletes itself once the tree is a project. A session that opens in an undetemplated fork and is asked to build something routes there first on its own. ADOPTING.md § Template fork says what the run is in for, if you want to know before forking.

Paste this into an agent session in the target repo:

Adopt the agent infrastructure from https://github.com/vzakharov/muthur
into this repo: clone it somewhere temporary, read ADOPTING.md, and follow it.

The agent selects a subset against your repo's actual shape, mostly by inspection — expect them to ask only about your session type and your deploy/test surface.

Either way, later changes here come forward with /update-muthur, whose shipped watermark already names this repo — you fill in the rest (see docs/adopting/sync.md). The infrastructure is adoptable and re-syncable; a fork is not a dead end.

Took it? Say hello in #168 — a sentence on what you're building, or just that you're here. Both routes have your agent offer to post it for you.

CLAUDE.md carries the conventions themselves, and each .claude/skills/*/SKILL.md carries its own full contract.

MIT © 2026 Vladimir Zakharov.