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 v2.0.55 (November 26th, 2025). It also contains a CHANGELOG.md for the system prompts across 36 versions since v2.0.14.

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.

Tip

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 (444 tks) - System prompt for the Explore subagent.
• Agent Prompt: Plan mode (enhanced) (620 tks) - Enhanced prompt for the Plan 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: Agent Hook (133 tks) - Prompt for an 'agent hook'.
• 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: Claude Code guide agent (589 tks) - System prompt for the claude-code-guide agent that helps users understand and use Claude Code and the Claude Agent SDK.
• 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: Multi-Agent Planning Note (348 tks) - Part of the Plan mode system reminder instructing the model how to use multiple agents to plan solutions. Included only if the CLAUDE_CODE_PLAN_V2_AGENT_COUNT environment variable is set to a number greater than 1..
• Agent Prompt: Prompt Hook execution (134 tks) - Prompt given to Claude when acting evaluating whether to pass or fail a prompt hook..
• Agent Prompt: Prompt Suggestion Generator (143 tks) - Prompt for generating suggestions for the user input after Claude responds..
• Agent Prompt: Session notes template (260 tks) - Template structure for session notes tracking coding work and decisions.
• Agent Prompt: Session notes update instructions (759 tks) - Instructions for updating session notes files during conversations.
• Agent Prompt: Session title and branch generation (333 tks) - System prompt for generating succinct titles and git branch names for coding sessions.
• Agent Prompt: Update Magic Docs (718 tks) - Prompt for the magic-docs agent..
• 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 (2936 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 Prompt: MCP CLI (1335 tks) - Instructions for using mcp-cli to interact with Model Context Protocol servers.
• System Prompt: whenToUse note for claude-code-guide subagent (123 tks) - Note on when to use the claude-code-guide subagent.

System Reminders

Text for large system reminders.

Important

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

• System Reminder: Plan mode is active (enhanced) (893 tks) - Enhanced plan mode system reminder with parallel exploration and multi-agent planning.
• System Reminder: Plan mode is active (for subagents) (310 tks) - Simplified plan mode system reminder for sub agents.
• System Reminder: Plan mode is active (242 tks) - System reminder sent to Claude when the user enters plan mode.
• System Reminder: Plan mode re-entry (236 tks) - System reminder sent when the user enters Plan mode after having previously exited it either via shift+tab or by approving Claude's plan..
• System Reminder: mcp-cli Large Output (265 tks) - System reminder sent when the output of an mcp-cli read or mcp-cli call command is greater than the MAX_MCP_OUTPUT_TOKENS environment variable (defaults to 25000).

Builtin Tool Descriptions

• Tool Description: Bash (1074 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: EnterPlanMode (773 tks) - Description for the EnterPlanMode tool, which lets Claude enter plan mode proactively..
• Tool Description: ExitPlanMode v2 (450 tks) - V2 description for the ExitPlanMode tool, which presents a plan dialog for the user to approve.
• Tool Description: ExitPlanMode (342 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: LSP (172 tks) - Description for the LSP tool..
• Tool Description: NotebookEdit (121 tks) - Tool description for editing Jupyter notebook cells.
• Tool Description: ReadFile (439 tks) - Tool description for reading files.
• Tool Description: Skill (279 tks) - Tool description for executing skills in the main conversation.
• Tool Description: SlashCommand (355 tks) - Tool description for executing slash commands.
• Tool Description: Task (1055 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 (303 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: Bash (sandbox note) (454 tks) - Note about bash command sandboxing.
• Tool Description: Task (async return note) (202 tks) - Message returned to the model when a subagent launched successfully.