CLAUDE.md Policy Generation Standard (v1.0)

A standard for Cloto-family projects whose product value depends on an AI agent behaving correctly without being asked: the project's skill MUST be able to generate a small, marker-wrapped policy block into the user's CLAUDE.md (or equivalent always-loaded agent memory file).

Status of this document

Pilot. This standard is piloted in cpersona (the same pilot model as the Release Lifecycle Standard): every rule below is exercised by the cpersona-memory skill before family-wide adoption. Canonical home: this repository, while the pilot runs.

1. Motivation

A skill is loaded conditionally and probabilistically — whether it activates in a given session depends on the conversation. CLAUDE.md is loaded deterministically in every session. Products like a memory server live or die on the agent proactively calling their tools (recall at session start, store on decisions, archive at session end); a rule that fires only when a skill happens to activate cannot carry that guarantee.

The fix is a promotion from probabilistic to deterministic: the skill — which the user does invoke at install time — writes the product's operating policy into the user's always-loaded CLAUDE.md. The skill remains the detailed manual; the policy block is the small resident kernel that makes the agent open the manual at the right moments.

2. Applicability

The unit of adoption is the independent repository: a project published as its own repository. Independence is a necessary condition — monorepos and servers vendored inside them (e.g. clotohub-servers) are out of scope of this standard entirely. Private repositories are exempt.

Every Cloto-family independent public repository MUST record a verdict in the table below (§5):

• Applicable — correct end-user experience depends on agent-side behavior that must persist across sessions. The repository MUST ship a skill, and that skill MUST include a policy-block generation task conforming to §3.
• N/A — no such behavior exists (specifications, libraries, curated lists, products with their own agent middleware). Recorded with a reason.

3. Requirements for the generation task

An applicable repository's skill MUST offer to persist the policy, and the generated block MUST satisfy all of the following:

1. Consent — the skill MUST show the exact block and get the user's approval before writing. Never modify a user's CLAUDE.md silently.
2. Placement — default target is the user-level file (~/.claude/CLAUDE.md), because the products this standard covers are cross-project infrastructure. A project-level CLAUDE.md MUST be offered as the scoped alternative.
3. Idempotency — the block is wrapped in versioned markers:

<!-- BEGIN <product>-policy vN (managed by the <skill-name> skill) -->
...
<!-- END <product>-policy -->

On re-run, a block whose BEGIN marker is already present is replaced in place (never appended twice). Content outside the markers is never touched. 4. Size budget — at most 40 lines between the markers. The budget exists to force selection, not to forbid substance: baseline operations (an obvious store, an explicit recall) work with no block at all, so every line must earn its place by changing what the agent does by default. Explanations, setup, and troubleshooting stay in the skill, referenced by a one-line pointer. CLAUDE.md is paid for in every session — respect the user's context window. 5. Versioning — bump vN whenever the block content changes. On re-run the skill upgrades an older-versioned block (with consent, per rule 1). 6. Language — the block is written in English only.

4. What belongs in a policy block

The test for every line: would the agent already do this without the block? If yes, cut it. The block's job is to reproduce the quality of life of a well-tuned operator environment — the reference here is the maintainer's own setup — not to restate behavior the agent performs anyway.

Include: the stable identity the agent should use (e.g. agent_id); the mandatory triggers with concrete natural-language fire conditions (the phrases that should cause a tool call — this is what the agent gets wrong without a policy); the non-obvious craft that separates a good deployment from a default one (e.g. pre-computing summaries so storage is synchronous, passing real history, lock discipline for critical rules, update-not-recreate for rule changes); the degraded/error behavior the user must not miss; and a minimal maintenance cadence. Exclude: install steps, tool references, configuration tables, prose rationale — that is the skill's job.

5. Applicability table

Repository	Verdict	Notes
cpersona	Applicable (pilot)	Memory triggers must fire proactively; block generated by the cpersona-memory skill.
CEmbedding	Applicable	Block generated by the cembedding skill: embedding-server liveness + degraded-recall runbook.
ClotoCore	N/A	The kernel is its own agent middleware; end users do not drive it through CLAUDE.md.
mgp-spec / mgp-rs	N/A	Specification / library — no agent-side behavior to persist.
awesome-mcp-servers	N/A	Curated list.
clotohub-servers	Out of scope	Monorepo — fails the independence precondition.

New independent repositories add a row here at creation time.