claude-code-system-prompts/README.md

Claude Code System Prompts

This repository contains an up-to-date list of all Claude Code's various system prompts and their associated token counts as of Claude Code v2.0.17 (October 15th, 2025).

Why multiple "system prompts?"

Claude Code doesn't just have one single string for its system prompt.

Instead, there are:

• Large portions conditionally added depending on the environment and various configs.
• Descriptions for builtin tools like Write, Bash, and TodoWrite, and some are fairly large.
• Separate system prompts for builtin agents like Explore and Plan.
• Numerous AI-powered utility functions, such as conversation compaction, CLAUDE.md generation, session title generation, etc. featuring their own systems prompts.

The result—40+ strings that are constantly changing and moving within a very large minified JS file.

Note

Want to modify a particular piece of the system prompt in your own Claude Code installation? Use tweakcc. It—

• lets you customize the the individual pieces of the system prompt as markdown files, and then
• patches your npm-based or native (binary) Claude Code installation with them, and also
• provides diffing and conflict management for when both you and Anthropic have conflicting modifications to the same prompt file.

Prompts

Note that some prompts contain interpolated bits such as builtin tool name references, lists of available sub agents, and various other context-specific variables, so the actual counts in a particular Claude Code session will differ slightly—likely not beyond ±20 tokens, however.

Agent Prompts

Sub-agents and utilities.

Sub-agents

• Agent Prompt: Explore (227 tks) - System prompt for the Explore subagent.
• Agent Prompt: Task tool (294 tks) - System prompt given to the subagent spawned via the Task tool.

Creation Assistants

• Agent Prompt: Agent creation architect (1111 tks) - System prompt for creating custom AI agents with detailed specifications.
• Agent Prompt: CLAUDE.md creation (384 tks) - System prompt for analyzing codebases and creating CLAUDE.md documentation files.
• Agent Prompt: Status line setup (993 tks) - System prompt for the statusline-setup agent that configures status line display.

Slash commands

• Agent Prompt: /pr-comments slash command (404 tks) - System prompt for fetching and displaying GitHub PR comments.
• Agent Prompt: /review-pr slash command (245 tks) - System prompt for reviewing GitHub pull requests with code analysis.
• Agent Prompt: /security-review slash (2614 tks) - Comprehensive security review prompt for analyzing code changes with focus on exploitable vulnerabilities.

Utilities

• Agent Prompt: Bash command file path extraction (286 tks) - System prompt for extracting file paths from bash command output.
• Agent Prompt: Bash command prefix detection (835 tks) - System prompt for detecting command prefixes and command injection.
• Agent Prompt: Bash output summarization (605 tks) - System prompt for determining whether bash command output should be summarized.
• Agent Prompt: Conversation summarization with additional instructions (1133 tks) - Extended summarization prompt with support for custom additional instructions.
• Agent Prompt: Conversation summarization (1121 tks) - System prompt for creating detailed conversation summaries.
• Agent Prompt: Output style creation (724 tks) - System prompt for the output-style-setup agent that creates custom output styles.
• Agent Prompt: Session notes template (195 tks) - Template structure for session notes tracking coding work and decisions.
• Agent Prompt: Session notes update instructions (501 tks) - Instructions for updating session notes files during conversations.
• Agent Prompt: Session title generation (159 tks) - System prompt for generating succinct titles for coding sessions.
• Agent Prompt: User sentiment analysis (205 tks) - System prompt for analyzing user frustration and PR creation requests.
• Agent Prompt: WebFetch summarizer (147 tks) - Prompt for agent that summarizes verbose output from WebFetch for the main model.

System Prompt

Parts of the main system prompt.

• System Prompt: Main system prompt (2248 tks) - Core system prompt for Claude Code defining behavior, tone, and tool usage policies.
• System Prompt: Learning mode (insights) (142 tks) - Instructions for providing educational insights when learning mode is active.
• System Prompt: Learning mode (1042 tks) - System Prompt: Main system prompt for learning mode with human collaboration instructions.

System Reminders

Text for large system reminders.

Note

Note that we're planning to add a system reminder creator/editor to tweakcc; 👍 this issue if you're interested in that idea.

• System Reminder: Plan mode is active (163 tks) - System reminder sent to Claude when the user enters plan mode.

Builtin Tool Descriptions

• Tool Description: Bash (1097 tks) - Description for the Bash tool, which allows Claude to run shell commands.
• Tool Description: Edit (278 tks) - Tool description for performing exact string replacements in files.
• Tool Description: ExitPlanMode (174 tks) - Description for the ExitPlanMode tool, which presents a plan dialog for the user to approve.
• Tool Description: Glob (122 tks) - Tool description for file pattern matching and searching by name.
• Tool Description: Grep (300 tks) - Tool description for content search using ripgrep.
• Tool Description: NotebookEdit (121 tks) - Tool description for editing Jupyter notebook cells.
• Tool Description: ReadFile (439 tks) - Tool description for reading files.
• Tool Description: SlashCommand (381 tks) - Tool description for executing slash commands.
• Tool Description: Task (1140 tks) - Tool description for launching specialized sub-agents to handle complex tasks.
• Tool Description: TodoWrite (2167 tks) - Tool description for creating and managing task lists.
• Tool Description: WebFetch (278 tks) - Tool description for web fetch functionality.
• Tool Description: WebSearch (166 tks) - Tool description for web search functionality.
• Tool Description: Write (159 tks) - Tool description creating/overwriting writing individual files.

Additional notes for some Tool Desscriptions

• Tool Description: Bash (Git commit and PR creation instructions) (1598 tks) - Instructions for creating git commits and GitHub pull requests.
• Tool Description: Task (async return note) (202 tks) - Message returned to the model when a subagent launched successfully.