OSTEON

The OSTEON plugin for Claude Code

Context, with the discipline of code.

Agentic tools made code cheap. Correct context is now the expensive part. OSTEON gives every project one governed knowledge repository, its BONE, and every session in it starts with a decay check.

Install in Claude Code Browse the 15 skills

  • 15 skills
  • The BONE scaffold
  • A session-start decay check
  • Release 0.1.0
Claude Code, abridged example
# add the marketplace and install
> /plugin marketplace add osteonlabs/osteon-framework
> /plugin install osteon@osteon
# give the project its BONE
> /osteon:bone-init --project "City Library Lending" --prefix cll --dir ~/city-library-lending-bone
# open Claude Code in it: the decay check runs first
$ cd ~/city-library-lending-bone && claude
BONE decay check: CDI not computable (no baseline yet).
  Next action: run the bone-curator audit (propose-then-ask), then seal the clock
> /osteon:bone-curator

How it works

01 Why

Context decays unseen.

Instruction files, wikis and agent memory have no owner and no review. An agent acts on a stale fact with full confidence.

02 What

One BONE per project.

One knowledge repository with no product code. It holds the project's constitution, its decisions, the contracts between its modules, the state of the running system as last verified, and the skills that operate it.

03 How

One owner per fact.

Each fact lives at the narrowest tier that holds it: the org, the project or one repository. Lower tiers reference; they never copy. At every session start in the BONE, a decay check says when a source moved under what the BONE claims.

Install and start, in Claude Code

Six steps. Five are typed at the Claude Code prompt, where a line that starts with ! runs as a shell command; step 4 opens a new session in the BONE, from your terminal or the desktop app. Copy a step, run it, mark it done.

Install from
Before you start
  • Claude Code with plugin support.
  • A POSIX shell with git, sed, grep, awk and find. The scaffold and every hook are POSIX sh with no other dependency.
  • For the release-archive route in step 1: curl and unzip.
  • For osteon-ossification-delivery-teaching only: Python 3.9 or later and a Chromium-family browser, for its PDF and screenshot steps.

Step 1 of 6

Add the OSTEON marketplace

From GitHub

The marketplace lives in the public repository osteonlabs/osteon-framework. Claude Code clones it and keeps it updated.

/plugin marketplace add osteonlabs/osteon-framework

Both routes add a marketplace named osteon. If you added the release archive first, remove it with /plugin marketplace remove osteon before adding the repository.

From the release archive, pinned to 0.1.0

The 0.1.0 release is archived on Zenodo as osteon-0.1.0.zip, with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23436020. Fetch and unpack it into your home folder, then add the folder as a marketplace.

! curl -L -o ~/osteon-0.1.0.zip "https://zenodo.org/records/23436020/files/osteon-0.1.0.zip?download=1" && unzip -q ~/osteon-0.1.0.zip -d ~
/plugin marketplace add ~/osteon-0.1.0

Claude Code reads the plugin from that folder, so keep ~/osteon-0.1.0 where it is. Prefer a browser? Download the file from the Zenodo record, unpack it, and give its folder to the second command. To try the plugin for one session without installing, start Claude Code from that folder with claude --plugin-dir ./plugins/osteon.

Step 2 of 6

Install the plugin

The same command on both routes. It installs fifteen skills, the BONE scaffold and one SessionStart hook. Each skill is invoked as /osteon:<name>, and Claude also loads one on its own when a request matches its description.

/plugin install osteon@osteon

Step 3 of 6

Scaffold the project's BONE

Run /osteon:bone-init with a project name, a short skill prefix and an empty target directory. The skill can also ask you for them.

/osteon:bone-init --project "City Library Lending" --prefix cll --dir ~/city-library-lending-bone

It creates the repository, makes the genesis commit and prints numbered next steps. Nothing is pushed; add --remote <url> to set origin.

Step 4 of 6

Open Claude Code in the new BONE

Start a new session in the new directory: from your terminal, or by opening the folder in the Claude Code desktop app. The installed plugin is there in every session.

cd ~/city-library-lending-bone && claude

The decay check runs at session start. On a fresh scaffold it reports the state uninitialised, which reads BONE decay check: CDI not computable (no baseline yet). That reading is correct until the knowledge base has real content and a sealed baseline.

Step 5 of 6

Work the printed next steps

  • Fill MANIFEST.yaml.
  • Write the first state records.
  • Open a decision record for each live question, with /osteon:bone-adr.
  • Run the first curation pass.
/osteon:bone-curator

Step 6 of 6

Come back to it, or bring someone in

Returning to the project later, or onboarding someone new:

/osteon:bone-onboard

The skills

Fifteen skills in two groups. Type one in Claude Code, or describe the job and let Claude load the skill whose description matches.

Showing all 15 skills.

Starting and operating a BONE

  • /osteon:bone-init

    Scaffold a new BONE for a project.

  • /osteon:bone-onboard

    Get up to speed on a project, or return to one after a gap.

  • /osteon:bone-adr

    Write, amend or supersede a decision record.

  • /osteon:bone-contract

    Create or version the contract for a seam between two modules.

  • /osteon:bone-curator

    Audit the knowledge base and change it with per-item approval.

  • /osteon:bone-git

    Branch, commit and open change requests the project's way.

  • /osteon:bone-review

    Review a change against the project's own bar.

  • /osteon:bone-standup

    Keep the daily brief, debrief and continuity journal.

The framework and the Ossification method

  • /osteon:osteon-framework

    Trace where a rule comes from, and name a way of working.

  • /osteon:osteon-ossification-planner-project-daily

    Plan a multi-repository project as one dated cycle per day.

  • /osteon:osteon-ossification-plan-starter

    Decide whether a plan may start, one question at a time.

  • /osteon:osteon-ossification-plan-implementor

    Run a gated plan as lanes in one session.

  • /osteon:osteon-single-session-ossification

    Run a large plan as one session with subagents.

  • /osteon:osteon-ossification-delivery-teaching

    Report what a cycle delivered to people outside it. Needs Python 3.9 or later and a Chromium-family browser.

  • /osteon:osteon-capture

    Record what a session learned, without writing a rule.

Tiers: one owner per fact

The three tiers
TierLives atOwns
T0 orgthis pluginThe methodology: how to record a decision, version a contract, run the curation loop.
T1 projectthe project's BONEThe project's facts, decisions, contracts and procedures, in prefix-named skills.
T2 repositorya code repository's own CLAUDE.mdConventions true inside that one repository.

A fact lives at exactly one tier, the narrowest that fully owns it. Lower tiers reference; they never copy. When a fact could sit at two tiers, place it by what would change it, not by topic.

The personal tier, your own preferences and memory, sits outside: a BONE never governs or cites it.

Paper and citation

OSTEON is described in the preprint Superintelligent Software Engineering: Governance That Scales with Capability, arXiv:2610.31306 [cs.SE], 2026. Cite the paper for the ideas, and the 0.1.0 release by its DOI, 10.5281/zenodo.23436020. The repository carries both in CITATION.cff and shows them as "Cite this repository". The content is licensed under CC BY 4.0 and the scripts under MIT.

M. M. Gholinejad, "Superintelligent Software Engineering: Governance That Scales with Capability," arXiv:2610.31306 [cs.SE], 2026. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2610.31306

The name

The osteon is the repeating structural unit of compact bone: layers laid down around one canal, kept in repair by the cells inside them. OSTEON does the same for what a project knows.