bassclef — an opinionated add-on for Claude Code

Where this fits, in five short answers

market category: Agent substrate. Sits under Claude Code, over your repo. Not an IDE, not a CI, not a workflow tool.
who it's for: The solo builder running six or more initiatives in parallel, around a day job and family. Larger teams may borrow it; methodology leans solo.
who it's not for: Teams of ten with a PM, an assignment router, a cross-team dependency graph. Different problem, different tool.
unique attribute: Three primitives: context that persists across every session, expert lenses on demand (Cockburn, Norman, Rams), and lifecycle hooks that keep momentum, guardrail every step, and enforce discipline. All from files you can read, not from model weights.
proof: Dozens of skills and hooks (growing every day). 82 luminary profiles. Running in daily production on 6 sibling repos. apache-2.0. Repo private for now; opens publicly at v1.0.

what it's made of

Six building blocks. That's the whole thing.

Not just markdown. Everything bassclef is made of. Markdown for the plans you write. Shell scripts for the guardrails at every Claude Code lifecycle event. JSON schemas for the state that persists. Plus tests to keep it honest. All files, all in your repo, all yours to modify.

block · rule

Rules

Markdown files with your project conventions. Loaded via SessionStart.

block · skill

Skills

Named slash-commands. /onboard-repo, /sprint, /verify. Composable.

block · hook

Hooks

Shell scripts at Claude Code lifecycle points. Gates, checks, formatters.

block · chronicle

Chronicles

Session-end paragraphs pinned to state. Read via /whereami.

block · luminary

Luminaries

82 practitioner profiles. Reasoning in the file, not the model.

block · state

State spine

Typed JSON per schema. Plain files, browsable.

Three reasons this isn't hand-waving.

The chart survives closing your laptop.

Every session ends by writing a paragraph to a file: what happened, what got decided, what's next. Every session starts by reading that paragraph back. Come back a week later. Both you and Claude know where you left off. This is running, not theory.

chronicle auto-writes on session-end · auto-reads on session-start · zero re-explanation
Named experts on call.

You want a design review? Type /luminary don-norman. Claude loads Norman's checklist from a markdown file and reviews with it. Cockburn for use cases. Rams for restraint. Beck for TDD. 82 checklists total. All files, all readable, all editable.

82 profiles · Beck · Cockburn · Norman · Rams · reasoning in the .md, not the weights
Dispatch from your phone works.

You dictate a paragraph from your phone. Claude picks a few design lenses, generates HTML variants, sends you a URL. This landing page came out of that pipeline, on a Sunday morning dog walk.

4 minutes paragraph → gallery · no vendor accounts · just Claude Code

About the maintainer

Solo operator running six or more software projects in parallel around a day job and family. Started bassclef because thirty minutes of context reconstruction per Claude Code session, times six projects, was eating my Saturday mornings.

Two decades across Amazon (AWS, Alexa), Capital One, BP, and bootstrapped startups: cloud infrastructure, consumer tech, regulated finance, industrial, solo-builder. bassclef distills what actually holds across that range. I'm carrying the learnings into the day job, not away from it.

The substrate is one person's opinionated solution. In daily use, growing every day. Shared with a considered early cohort, one operator at a time. If it maps to how you work, drop your email below.

Sunjay on LinkedIn ↗ · maintainer@bassclef.dev

Status: alpha, in daily production on 6 sibling repos

License: apache-2.0

Cost: free (you'll need Claude Code; that's a separate subscription)

Repo: private for now. Comes with your invite. Goes public at v1.0.

Maintainer: one

Want the invite?

Approved adopters get a per-OS tarball behind GitHub or Google login. Short-lived signed link. If we're a fit, you'll hear back within a day.