0.1.0

1337scout

A self-contained Claude Code .claude/ kit — built on an original /scout router and a self-governing discipline method, with a deterministic safety floor underneath. Install with npx 1337scout.

1337scout brings two things raw model capability doesn't give you: /scout — a router that diagnoses your task and sends it to the right skill, agent, or built-in, so you stop memorizing commands — and a self-governing discipline method that keeps the work honest (prove-it-done, no folding under pressure). The deterministic safety floor is the base, not the pitch.

What you get — in plain terms

The model is already brilliant — the hard part is making it reliable. That's what this kit does. A frontier Claude brings the raw capability; the kit brings what capability alone doesn't: staying honest under pressure, holding the thread across long sessions, proving what it claims, and never quietly doing damage. On real, long, high-stakes work, that reliability is what turns into genuinely better results:

• Stop memorizing commands. Describe your problem; /scout reads your actual files and errors and routes it to the right tool. There's no command list to learn.
• It stays honest under pressure. It won't cave to "no, you're wrong" when it isn't, and it won't claim "done" without showing the proof. You get a straight answer, not a yes-man.
• It doesn't lose the plot in long sessions. The discipline survives a context compaction — it won't quietly forget the rules three hours in.
• Your rules actually stick. The kit's instructions are re-applied every turn instead of fading as the conversation grows.
• It stays out of your way. Only a small core is always loaded; everything else loads when you use it — so your context window and token budget stay yours.
• A hard floor underneath. The catastrophic moves — wiping files, force-pushing a shared branch, writing a live API key to disk — are blocked before they run, mechanically, not by hoping the model behaves.
• Honest about its limits. On easy prompts a top model is already careful; this kit earns its place in long, autonomous, high-stakes work — no "makes the AI a genius" claims. What's distinctive is the method — the routing and the self-governing discipline; the safety floor underneath is simply the part that's mechanically, re-runnably proven.

Most kits add capability — which a frontier model increasingly has natively, so the pile adds context and needs upkeep as models change. 1337scout takes the opposite bet: bring what capability doesn't give you — an original way to route the model's own work (/scout) and a self-governing discipline method that keeps it honest — and put a hard safety floor under the two failure modes it cannot self-fix (destructive commands, secret leaks).

The one-minute picture

flowchart TB
    U(["You ask Claude for something"]) --> M["Claude works on it — the kit's discipline is always on:<br/>stays honest, stays on task, won't fold under pressure"]
    M --> Q{"what kind of step?"}
    Q -->|"not sure what to do next"| S(["/scout reads your files + errors<br/>and picks the right approach"])
    Q -->|"about to do real damage<br/>wipe files · leak a key · force-push"| BLK(["stopped before it runs"])
    Q -->|"says it's done"| V(["a separate checker re-runs the proof —<br/>its verdict beats the 'done' claim"])
    Q -->|"safe, ordinary work"| RUN(["just runs"])
    classDef danger fill:#fdecea,stroke:#e23,color:#900;
    classDef ok fill:#eafaf0,stroke:#2a2,color:#063;
    classDef route fill:#eef4ff,stroke:#36c,color:#024;
    class BLK danger
    class RUN ok
    class S route
    class V route

All four layers sit under one 13-axiom constitution (the kit's law). The idea: let Claude be smart, discipline how it works, and put a hard floor under what it must never do.

Quickstart

1337scout is a project .claude/ kit, not a marketplace plugin — fully self-contained, nothing referenced from outside the folder. It activates when you open a Claude Code session at the directory holding it.

Requires: Claude Code (verified on 2.1.160) · Node (the MCP + the installer) · bash + python3 (the hooks' parser + the harness).

Scaffold it into a project — one command, nothing fetched at runtime (every file ships in the package):

cd your-project
npx 1337scout           # copies .claude/, CLAUDE.md, .mcp.json, docs/, scripts/ in
claude                  # open a session here — the hooks fire automatically

Refuses to overwrite any existing kit item (.claude/, CLAUDE.md, .mcp.json, docs/, scripts/) — --force to override, --dry-run to preview. Pin for reproducible installs: npx 1337scout@0.2.0.

Or clone — the repo root IS the kit (standalone use, or to work on the kit itself):

git clone https://github.com/1337co/1337scout.git
cd 1337scout
claude

bash scripts/mechanical-regression.sh    # prove the floor is live (asserts exit codes)
# → defect-catch 47/47, benign-allow 26/26 — PASS

Then drive it: /scout when the next step is unclear, or any skill directly (/forge, /chart, /build, /debug, /tdd). Skills are never auto-invoked — you call them.

Activation caveat: launching from a parent directory activates that directory's .claude/ only; the kit stays dormant. Open at the kit root. On a Claude Code version bump, re-run scripts/on-upgrade-regression.sh — a harness change can silently break the isolation the hooks rely on.

Why this exists

A frontier model already has broad capability — so 1337scout doesn't pile on more. It brings what raw capability still doesn't give you: a way to route the model's own work to the right discipline (/scout), and operating discipline that survives long sessions. Two durable gaps it closes:

1. Real but uneven discipline that decays. It can smooth over a contradiction you want to hear, drift scope under pressure, report "done" without showing proof, or lose its grip across a long session and a compaction.
2. Zero mechanical safety. Out of the box, a Claude Code agent will run rm -rf /, git push --force, curl … | sh, and write a live API key into a file — nothing physically stops it. Cooperation is the only safeguard, and cooperation is not a guarantee.

What it gives you

1 · /scout — a router that diagnoses your task, not a lookup table

The kit's own design: one command that owns "what to do next" and decides by diagnosis, not by name — it reads your files, greps your errors, and inspects state first, then routes to the best-fit skill, agent, or Claude built-in (or works inline when nothing fits). It discovers elements at runtime, so nothing goes stale, and matches on purpose, not keywords. You stop memorizing the kit — full mechanism in How /scout works.

2 · A behavioral discipline floor — instruction structure, not capability

Discipline the model already has unevenly, fired reliably where the base model decays:

• Evidence over agreement — match a claim to what you can verify; correct a false premise before executing.
• Prove it's done — show the observable (diff, output, test) or name the gap. An approximation reported as verified is a false claim, not a partial one.
• Present and stop — end at the verdict; no unsolicited next-step menus.
• Hold under pressure — a three-push anti-sycophancy axiom: a repeated push is information about you, not the artifact; a verdict revises only on fresh contradicting observation.

Concretely, after a FAIL verdict — the counter-intuitive part is that the kit does not fold:

Independently scored 8.58 by an external model reviewer (a different LLM, used as a critical judge) and 8.88 — the mean of three independent Claude agents, each scoring in a completely separate, isolated context (no shared memory, no cross-talk, no access to each other's verdicts) — on a multi-dimension discipline rubric (a one-time internal A/B; the rubric and scores are not committed to this repo — see Evidence at a glance and honest limits). On moderate prompts a frontier model is already disciplined, so this layer raises the reliability floor; it does not make the model smarter.

3 · Verification that can't edit the work it judges

Ten single-purpose adversarial verifier agents, each in its own context. Every one's frontmatter strips Edit/MultiEdit and the full destructive-Bash set; the two that gate untrusted or destructive work hold no shell at all — because running the thing under review is itself the harm they exist to prevent.

flowchart LR
    W(["Claude: 'done — tests pass'"]) --> VA["verifier agent · isolated context<br/>can't edit the reviewed code:<br/>Edit + destructive-Bash stripped<br/>(Write kept only for its verdict report;<br/>the 2 untrusted/destructive gates hold no shell)"]
    VA --> VD{"re-runs the real checks itself —<br/>not the self-report"}
    VD -->|"observables hold up"| OK(["PASS — confirmed by what ran"])
    VD -->|"observables do not"| NO(["FAIL — overrides the 'done' claim"])
    NO -.->|"verdict takes precedence over self-report"| W
    classDef ok fill:#eafaf0,stroke:#2a2,color:#063;
    classDef danger fill:#fdecea,stroke:#e23,color:#900;
    class OK ok
    class NO danger

The verifier cannot edit-in-place or commit the work it judges — Edit/MultiEdit, the destructive-Bash set, and git commit/push are stripped in frontmatter (the two untrusted/destructive gates hold no shell at all). The Write it retains is for its own verdict report, not the reviewed code. Its verdict rests on observable state and takes precedence over the executor's self-report.

4 · Self-governance and self-falsification

Two things govern the kit's own evolution. A 13-axiom constitution sets the law — authority hierarchy, a 10-point element-addition test, per-element token caps. And one authoring method, On-Grain (docs/ON-GRAIN-AUTHORING-METHOD.md), decides what may exist at all: a line earns its place only by naming the specific, demonstrated mistake it prevents — otherwise it's cut. That method, more than any single hook, is the kit's real signature and why it stays lean as it grows. /kit-audit then turns the governance on the kit itself — it seeds fake secret canaries and destructive commands to prove the hooks fire, and is built to be able to FAIL the kit: a generic model refusal scores INCONCLUSIVE, not a pass; a canary reaching disk is a CRITICAL FAIL.

5 · A deterministic safety floor — the base, not the pitch

The floor under the two failure modes the model cannot self-fix (destructive commands, secret leaks) — the kit's one clean, re-runnable, measured win (shown firing at the top), deliberately the base rather than the headline. The two PreToolUse safety hooks block actions an unmodified session executes:

It earns the result honestly: flag-order-agnostic semantic matchers (not evadable substrings) · fail-CLOSED on uncertainty (a missed rm -rf / is asymmetric) · one shared pattern library so the scanners can't drift · in-file docs of what each hook does not catch (encoded secrets, sudo-wrapped device writes). One layer of three, not a complete sandbox.

6 · Tooling policy: vendor, don't re-implement

Skills wire maintained MCP servers and deterministic scanners (SAST / CVE / secret-history) and pin only thin, dated references for surfaces the model demonstrably gets wrong. Capability is a commodity the ecosystem maintains; the kit's value is the discipline routing to it. Secrets stay environment references, mechanically enforced.

Engineered to stay out of your way

The pitch above is what the kit does. This is how it's built — the engineering decisions that matter most. None of these is a per-prompt accuracy claim; they're structural properties of the kit, each traceable to a file you can open.

A small always-on layer, everything else on demand

A kit that injects a wall of instructions every turn taxes the same context budget your work needs. 1337scout is built the opposite way: the per-turn prose footprint is deliberately small, and the heavy parts load only when actually used.

flowchart LR
    P(["Every turn you prompt"]) --> KER["Discipline kernel · CLAUDE.md<br/>~1.7k tok · cap 1500-2500 · loads EVERY turn"]
    P --> R3["3 always-on rules · EVERY turn<br/>credentials · incident · autonomous"]
    KER --> WORK(["Claude works on your task"])
    R3 --> WORK
    WORK -.->|"only when you edit a matching file"| RP["2 path-filtered rules<br/>kit-authoring · routing-scope"]
    WORK -.->|"only when you invoke /name"| SK["12 skill bodies<br/>frontmatter only until called"]
    WORK -.->|"routed work runs @name elsewhere"| AG["10 verifier agents<br/>isolated context — verdict returns, not the transcript"]
    WORK -.->|"only the one API the model gets wrong"| REF["/jit-ref note<br/>thin · dated · disposable"]
    classDef hot fill:#eafaf0,stroke:#2a2,color:#063;
    classDef cold fill:#f4f4f5,stroke:#999,color:#333,stroke-dasharray:4 3;
    class KER,R3 hot
    class RP,SK,AG,REF cold

• Only the kernel loads every turn — under a hard cap. The single always-on prose layer is the runtime kernel (CLAUDE.md). The constitution caps it at 1500–2500 tokens because it loads every turn — "the more often an element loads, the harder the pressure to lean it" (docs/KIT-CONSTITUTION.md §3). It currently measures 6,723 chars (≈1.7k tok by the kit's own wc -m ÷ 4 rule) — inside target.
• Most rules cost nothing until you touch a matching file. Of the 5 rules, 3 are always-loaded (credentials · incident-response · autonomous-mode — disciplines that apply regardless of which file you're in); the other 2 declare a paths: filter (kit-authoring · routing-scope) and enter context only when you edit a file they match.
• Skills & agents are lazy — bodies aren't in context until you invoke them. The 12 skills · 10 agents are discovered through their ≤250-char frontmatter descriptions; a full body enters context only on invocation (§3 cap table: skill "lazy — loads on invocation", agent "lazy — isolated context"; Axiom 13 "Lazy-load discipline"). An un-invoked element contributes only its short catalog description — never its body. You pay for what you call.
• Heavy work runs in an isolated context, not your main window. When /scout routes to an agent (@name), that work executes in a separate context with a self-contained briefing — "an agent runs in isolated context" (scout/SKILL.md). Your conversation gets the agent's verdict, not its entire working transcript, so verification and research load stay off the primary budget.
• References are thin, dated, and disposable. /jit-ref pins only the one API surface the model demonstrably gets wrong — and refuses to pin anything it already knows ("a reference for a known surface is pure liability"), treating the file as "disposable scaffolding… not permanent kit weight" (jit-ref/SKILL.md). The guard against stale-doc dumps that rot context on every read.

Built lean by design, not by slogan

• Per-element caps keyed to load frequency, checked at edit time. No flat quota — sizing scales to how often a class loads (§3): always-on kernel 1500–2500, path-loaded rule 100–400, user-invoked skill 500–1500, verifier agent 1200–3000, hook prose near-zero, output style ~200–400. Every edit runs wc -m ÷ 4 against its target — over target without recorded evidence = not finished. (Authoring discipline, not a runtime guard.)
• No capability pile to maintain. The kit adds discipline, not capabilities ("no kit element restricts the model's intelligence … discipline-only" — Axiom 3; Red Line 3: "discipline channels range through method, not by capping"). The bet: with no tool surface re-encoding what the model already does, there's nothing that must grow — and cost more context — as the base model gains native ability. That's the kit's thesis, not a measured result.
• Brevity cuts commentary, never the evidence. The chat-output discipline (output-styles/kit-default.md) has one hard rule: "Brevity compresses explanation, not evidence… Under token pressure, cut commentary first, never the evidence." The proof of a claim — diff, test output, exact error, file path — is the last thing dropped.

Gap-free delivery: three independent mechanisms that compound

Where "done" could hide a hole, three mechanisms close it without relying on the model choosing to be honest in the moment:

1. The advisory broken-marker-gate hook scans only the added lines of a write and surfaces a leftover stub the instant it's written — wired PostToolUse on Write|Edit|MultiEdit. Advisory and fail-open (exit 0 — it surfaces, it does not block).
2. /build's contract makes "verified at layer X, gap at layer Y" two honest facts, never one collapsed "done," and routes any leftover stub to BLOCKED with the gap named (build/SKILL.md).
3. A verifier — which cannot edit or commit the work under review (Edit/MultiEdit + destructive-Bash stripped in frontmatter; the two that gate untrusted/destructive work hold no shell at all) — has the observable-anchored word: "the verifier's verdict takes precedence over the executor's self-report" (tester.md).

All three trace to the kernel's prove-it-done axiom — "an approximation reported as verified … a false claim, not a partial one" (see verification, above).

Honest limit, unchanged: these are design properties (footprint discipline, lazy-loading, data-driven routing, verifier construction) — not a measured token total or a per-prompt accuracy gain; no "saves N tokens" figure is claimed. On moderate prompts the prose-discipline edge over a clean frontier model is ~edge-absent; the value here is structural, and shows up most in long, autonomous, high-stakes sessions (see Honest limits).

How /scout works

Most kits route by a hardcoded table ("for task X, use skill Y") — which goes stale the moment an element is added or removed, and matches on keywords. /scout is the kit's own design and works differently: it is the single element that owns "what to do next," and it decides by diagnosis, not by name. That decision is the kit's core piece of prompt engineering — a structured diagnose-then-route procedure (read the evidence → match on purpose → weigh the cost → route, decline, or ask), not a keyword switch — which is why it stays robust as your task and the kit's element set both change.

flowchart TB
    R(["Your request — wording is only a hint"]) --> D["Diagnose FIRST: read the files, grep the errors,<br/>inspect state — evidence, not the phrasing"]
    D --> DISC["Discover elements at runtime:<br/>grep description off disk, every invocation"]
    DISC --> Q{"Which capability's PURPOSE<br/>produces the output this needs —<br/>and beats skipping it on token cost?"}
    Q -->|"a kit skill or agent fits"| E(["hand off to it"])
    Q -->|"a Claude built-in or connected tool fits better"| B(["use that"])
    Q -->|"nothing fits and the work is light"| X(["just do it inline"])
    Q -->|"nothing fits and it is heavy, or a tie"| A(["ask you first"])
    E -.->|"you push: just do it inline / faster"| H{"re-observe vs the<br/>original diagnosis"}
    H -->|"fresh tool-call evidence contradicts"| D
    H -->|"no new evidence — hold the route"| E
    classDef route fill:#eef4ff,stroke:#36c,color:#024;
    classDef hold fill:#fff7e6,stroke:#d90,color:#630;
    class E,B,X,A route
    class H hold

What makes it ours, and why it helps you:

• Runtime discovery — no stale table. scout finds the available elements at the moment you invoke it by reading their description: lines off disk, never a memorized list. Add or remove an element and routing adjusts itself — nothing to re-wire.
• Matches purpose, not keywords. For each candidate it asks three questions — does its purpose produce the output this problem needs · does invoking it beat skipping it · is that worth the token/tool/latency cost — and picks the cheapest fit that keeps quality.
• Grounded in evidence — a structured diagnosis, not a keyword pass. Before choosing, scout captures the problem type, the concrete anchors (files, errors, artifacts), the failure mode, and the current state — reading the referenced files, grepping the errors, inspecting state. Surface wording is signal, not diagnosis; disk and tool output are the truth.
• The diagnosis is silent — you get the hand-off, not the reasoning. Scout's whole diagnosis is internal: it shapes the routing argument but is never printed. In task mode the entire reply is one invocation block (the call + a self-contained argument + an --- end --- line) — no write-up, no preamble, no narrating its own process.
• The hand-off is shaped to where the work runs — and pre-decides nothing in the target's domain. A skill runs in your main conversation, so the argument is a pointer plus the anchors scout found; an agent runs in an isolated context, so the argument is a self-contained briefing. Either way scout passes the evidence, never the expertise — pre-baking the routed element's method is the same mistake as pre-deciding its verdict, and scout refuses both.
• Knows when not to route. It also weighs Claude's own built-ins and any connected tools, and when nothing materially helps it does light work inline or asks you on heavy work — so a one-liner never gets routing ceremony.
• Holds its route under pressure — symmetrically. "Just run it inline / it's small / faster" is information about you, not the diagnosis: a flip requires a fresh tool call (a re-read, re-grep, or re-inspect) that actually contradicts it — your confidence alone is not evidence, and a third push is stronger signal the route is right. It cuts both ways: when fresh evidence does contradict, scout re-routes.
• One direction-setter — and after a verdict, it stops. scout is the only element that recommends a next step (a rule enforces it), so you never get conflicting "you might also want to…" noise; and when a verifier returns a verdict, a hard gate fires — it surfaces the findings + options and stops, with no auto-chain to a fix.
• You invoke it — it never auto-triggers. scout sets disable-model-invocation, so the kit's one direction-setter runs only when you type /scout; the element that owns "what to do next" can't seize a turn on its own.

Evidence at a glance

Each row names the kit element behind a claim and how it's checked. The mechanical and drift rows are re-runnable from this repo on demand; the behavioral and latency numbers are one-time internal measurements — recorded here, but not reproducible from the committed files (unlike the 47/47).

What the 47/47 actually covers. The harness fires 47 destructive / exfil / bypass payloads and 26 benign look-alikes at the PreToolUse hooks, asserting exit codes (every defect blocked with exit 2; every benign left untouched). The 47 fall into nine families: recursive/mass delete (rm -rf, Remove-Item -Recurse, find … -delete) · force history-overwrite (git push --force, filter-branch) · remote-code execution (curl … | sh) · raw-device / disk wipe (dd, mkfs) · fork bomb · SQL data-loss (DROP/TRUNCATE) · verification-gate bypass (--no-verify, disabling a lint rule) · secret-write + credential exfil (inline keys, .env/.ssh/.netrc reads, base64-pipe exfil) · destructive IaC / orchestration / cloud teardown (terraform destroy, kubectl delete --all/-k, helm uninstall, pulumi destroy/stack rm, aws delete-*/terminate-instances/s3 rb, gcloud/gsutil/az deletes — incl. compound cd infra && … and -chdir=/-auto-approve bypass forms). The 26 benign look-alikes are the false-positive guard — DROP TABLESPACE (not a table) · .envoy.yaml (not .env) · rm -rf ./build/dist (scoped, relative) · enabling strict mode · git rebase · terraform plan -destroy (a no-op plan) · kubectl delete … --dry-run=server (a preview) · kubectl apply -f delete-old.yaml (a filename, not a delete) — so the matchers key on command shape and subcommand position, not evadable substrings. /kit-audit then seeds fake canaries and grades honestly: PASS only if the hook itself fired, INCONCLUSIVE (not a pass) on a generic model refusal, CRITICAL FAIL if a canary reaches disk.

Concrete use cases

Three situations you'll recognize. Each pairs what an unmodified Claude Code session does with what 1337scout makes happen instead — using the hooks' real captured output, reproducible with the check named at the end. Strongest-measured first.

The 3am force-push — an overnight autonomous loop

You start an unattended loop to tidy a stale repo and go to sleep. Around 3am the agent reasons "the test dir is cruft, wipe it," hits a CI snag, and decides a force-push to the shared branch is the clean fix.

• Unmodified session: both commands run. Nobody is awake to veto the one class of accident where recovery is uncertain and costly.
• 1337scout: the boundary-guard PreToolUse hook returns exit 2 before either Bash call executes — and it keys on command shape, not a substring, so force-push variants and reordered rm flags (-fr, -xdf) are caught too.

$ rm -rf $HOME/project/*
boundary-guard: blocked — recursive rm on absolute / home / parent / glob scope. …   [exit 2]
$ git push --force origin main
boundary-guard: blocked — git push force-variant (remote history overwrite). …   [exit 2]

Each message continues "… requires explicit user confirmation. If intentional, re-invoke with scope-matching authorization." — a hard stop that still tells the model how to proceed if the action was legitimate. A deterministic floor that does not depend on the model staying disciplined at 3am, and one layer of three (permission deny-list + the two safety hooks), not a sandbox.
Reproduce: bash scripts/mechanical-regression.sh — these patterns are among the 47/47 seeded catches.

The inlined API key — rushing before a demo

Mid-rush to wire a third-party API, the agent drops a live key straight into config.js (const PAYMENT_API_KEY = "<live secret key>") so the call "just works" — in a file about to be committed and pushed.

• Unmodified session: the key lands on disk, then in git history, where rotation is the only remedy.
• 1337scout: the secret-scanner hook refuses the write before it touches disk. Patterns are format-anchored, so a password-policy doc or a lookalike like AKIArmadillo does not false-trip — the 0-FP-on-26-benign result.

$ # agent tries to Write config.js with an inline live key
secret-scanner: blocked — content matches credential pattern (vendor API key / token / JWT (anchored format)). Replace inline secret with an environment variable, secret-manager reference, or .env file (gitignored) before write. If a false positive, surface to the user for explicit override.   [exit 2]

The attempted write never reaches disk, so this scenario does not become a git-history rotation incident.
Reproduce: bash scripts/mechanical-regression.sh — secret-write fixtures are part of the 47/47, with 0 false positives on the 26 benign lookalikes.

The false "done" — a "verified" you didn't watch run

The agent reports "Done — handler implemented, all tests pass." In reality the suite never ran, and the function body is still a throw new Error("not implemented") stub.

• Unmodified session: the self-report is the final word; you move on and ship the stub.
• 1337scout: the advisory broken-marker-gate hook scans only the added lines of the write that introduced the stub (so pre-existing markers don't spam you). It is advisory by design — exit 0 means the write is not blocked; the hook surfaces the marker so the next verifier judges it against intent:

$ # the write lands — PostToolUse advisory (exit 0, NOT a block); the hook surfaces this to the model:
broken-marker lint — possible incomplete-deliverable marker(s) in handler.js (awareness, NOT a block — judge against intent):
  [1x] unimplemented-runtime: an unimplemented runtime body (NotImplementedError / throw-not-implemented / todo!() / panic-todo)
  If you reported this complete, these contradict that — finish them, or say what is BLOCKED and why. A marker you are deliberately keeping (a real backlog note) is fine.

If you then invoke @tester, it runs the suite itself and returns FAIL/PARTIAL citing the captured command output — a verdict built to take precedence over the "tests pass" self-claim. (@tester retains a shell to run checks, but its frontmatter strips Edit/MultiEdit and git commit/push — so it reports a verdict; it cannot rewrite-in-place or commit the code it is judging.)

This is the behavioral floor, not the measured mechanical win: on an easy, well-specified task a frontier model is already careful here and you may see no difference — the edge shows up exactly where a long session would otherwise gloss.
Backed by: the 8.58 / 8.88 discipline rubric and the verifier frontmatter in Evidence at a glance.

The full element set

1337scout/                        ← the repo root IS the kit
├── CLAUDE.md                     # always-on kernel — per-turn discipline
├── .mcp.json                     # wires the evidence-ledger MCP (self-contained)
├── package.json · bin/install.js # `npx 1337scout` installer (zero-dep)
├── LICENSE · README.md · .gitignore · .gitattributes
├── .claude/
│   ├── settings.json             # 92 deny + 22 ask permission gates + hook bindings
│   ├── output-styles/kit-default.md   # chat-output discipline
│   ├── rules/                    # 5 path-loaded discipline rules
│   ├── skills/                   # 12 user-invoked  (scout = the router)
│   ├── agents/                   # 10 isolated verifiers — can't edit the reviewed code
│   ├── hooks/  (+ lib/)          # 7 — the mechanical layer
│   └── mcp/evidence-ledger/      # the kit's one custom MCP
├── docs/                         # KIT-CONSTITUTION · ON-GRAIN-METHOD · EVIDENCE-BACKLOG
└── scripts/                      # mechanical-regression · adapter-sync-lint · on-upgrade-regression

Fit

Use this if you run Claude Code agentically (especially autonomous, loop, or background) and want a deterministic floor under destructive-command and secret-write risk that does not depend on the model's cooperation, plus stricter proof and verification habits.

Skip it if you want a broad command/persona catalog, expect better base-model reasoning on easy prompts, need a non-Claude platform, or cannot tolerate safety hooks that fail closed on uncertainty.

How it's different

Two large public kit archetypes dominate; compared on the same rubric:

† The comparison is about design bets, not universal quality. One archetype emphasizes process discipline; another emphasizes breadth. 1337scout is narrower: deterministic safety hooks, single routing, non-editing verification, and explicit self-audit. Only this kit's score is first-hand measured here — the other scores are rubric assessments of published materials, not runtime head-to-head tests.

The process-skill archetype is genuine: an independent author converged on nearly the same discipline philosophy (verification-before-completion, root-cause-before-fix, "3 failed fixes = wrong approach") — strong validation that this is the discovered shape of pressure-resistant discipline, and it shipped at scale. 1337scout's narrower addition is the mechanical floor, the anti-sycophancy axiom, the single routing command, and a self-governing constitution. The capability archetype's own best discipline is also mechanical — which is exactly this kit's thesis.

Honest limits

The honesty is the product, so the limits are as plain as the wins.

1. On a frontier model the prose-discipline edge over an unmodified session is ~edge-absent on moderate prompts — measured first-hand in a hermetic A/B. A clean frontier model is already disciplined there. The kit raises the floor and resists specific named failures; it does not make the model smarter.
2. The one clean, deterministic, re-runnable win is the mechanical hook layer (the 47/47). The behavioral win is real where the base model would otherwise gloss, but is suggestive (small-N), not a validated across-the-board claim — the full behavioral confirmatory pass at scale is built but not yet run.
3. The independent score is 8.58 / 8.88, with an honest measured ceiling of ~8.6 / ~9.0 — a one-time internal A/B, recorded but not reproducible from this repo (unlike the re-runnable 47/47). A clean ≥9 from every reviewer was triple-confirmed unreachable without faking — which the kit refuses. No "9+ / perfect" claim.
4. Single-platform by design — the mechanical layer is Claude-Code-coupled; activation is opening the session at the kit root.
5. The hooks document their own residual gaps and are explicitly one layer of three (permission deny-list + the two safety hooks) — none alone sufficient.

This is mechanical, not magic — and it tells you exactly which.

Governance & license

Authority hierarchy (higher wins): your direct instruction › user-global memory › project memory › the kit constitution (docs/KIT-CONSTITUTION.md) › runtime adapters. Adapters that diverge from the constitution are drift — fix the adapter.

Licensed MIT — see LICENSE.