knowhow

Personal knowledge base and Claude Code setup for growing toward Staff / Principal Engineer.

The loop: capture → review → decide → publish → automate.

| Step | Skill | Cadence | Output | |---|---|---|---| | Capture | /rryter:capture | after meaningful tasks | sanitized note in notes/, line in impact-log.md | | Review | /rryter:weekly-review | weekly, ~15 min | inbox processed, themes, blog scores updated | | Decide | /rryter:decision-record | after design choices | ADR in decisions/ | | Publish | /rryter:blog-triage | monthly | ranked ideas, one outline in blog/drafts/ | | Automate | /rryter:skill-forge | when something repeats | new skill in forged-skills/ | | Recall | /rryter:recall | whenever you need it | answer from your notes, with sources and gaps |

Two subagents support this: rryter:staff-reviewer (principal-engineer review of designs/PRs) and rryter:editor (turns drafts into publishable posts).

All of it ships as the Claude Code plugin rryter, so everything is namespaced: /rryter:<skill>, rryter:<agent>. Day-to-day usage: HOW-TO-USE.md.

Layout

.claude-plugin/
  plugin.json        # the "rryter" plugin
  marketplace.json   # "knowhow" marketplace, serving the plugin from this checkout
skills/          # the five skills above
agents/          # staff-reviewer, editor
hooks/
  hooks.json              # registers both hooks with the plugin
  log-session.sh          # SessionEnd: logs each session to inbox/sessions.md
  guard-confidential.sh   # PreToolUse: blocks writes to this repo containing client terms or patterns
  scan-confidential.pl    # the scanner, shared with the git pre-commit check
  pre-commit.sh           # installed into .git/hooks by the installer
  confidential-patterns.default  # seed for .confidential-patterns
forged-skills/   # skills made with /rryter:skill-forge, linked as plain user skills
scaffold/        # pristine seed files for npm-installed bases
templates/       # note, decision, post
inbox/           # raw captures (sessions.md is local only, gitignored)
notes/           # atomic, sanitized learnings
decisions/       # ADRs
blog/ideas.md    # scored backlog
blog/short-posts.md  # LinkedIn / X drafts from the weekly review
blog/drafts/
impact-log.md    # brag doc
skills-candidates.md
growth.md        # competencies practised this quarter
tags.md          # agreed tag vocabulary

Install

From npm (scaffolds a fresh knowledge base):

npx @rryter/knowhow install              # base in ~/knowhow
npx @rryter/knowhow install --dir ~/kb   # or anywhere else

From a checkout of this repo:

git clone [email protected]:rryter/knowhow.git ~/knowhow
cd ~/knowhow && ./install.sh

The skills and hooks address the base as ~/knowhow, so when it lives elsewhere the installer makes ~/knowhow a symlink to it (and refuses if ~/knowhow is already something else). It also:

• creates the base folders, templates and seed files where missing; existing content is never overwritten. Git checkouts are never written to
• registers the base as the knowhow plugin marketplace and installs rryter@knowhow. A checkout serves the plugin from itself; an npm-installed base fetches it from the @rryter/knowhow package
• links forged-skills/* into ~/.claude/skills/
• allows read-only access to the base from every project (Read(~/knowhow/**) in ~/.claude/settings.json), so /rryter:recall and rryter:staff-reviewer work in your work repos. Writes still prompt and go through the guard
• removes the symlinks and settings.json hook entries left by pre-plugin installs (backing up settings.json first), and creates a local .confidential-terms file

Requires Node 20+, jq and the claude CLI.

To update: npx @rryter/knowhow@latest install for an npm-installed base, or git pull && ./install.sh for a checkout. Both find the base through ~/knowhow, so --dir is only needed the first time. Restart Claude Code afterwards.

Then add the snippet from ~/knowhow/global-CLAUDE.md to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md.

Publishing

package.json files whitelists only the plugin manifest, skills, agents, hooks, templates and scaffold/ (pristine seed files). Your own notes, decisions, ideas and impact log are never packed. Check with npm pack --dry-run and claude plugin validate ., then npm publish. Keep version in package.json and .claude-plugin/plugin.json in sync.

Using it from a work repo

claude --add-dir ~/knowhow

The plugin is installed at user scope, so /rryter:capture works in any project.

Confidentiality

This repo must never contain client code, internal names, URLs, ticket IDs or data. Only generalized learnings.

• Every skill that writes here has a mandatory sanitize step.
• hooks/guard-confidential.sh blocks any write into this repo that contains a term from .confidential-terms (one per line, case-insensitive) or matches .confidential-patterns (one <label> <Perl regex> per line: ticket keys, internal hostnames, private IPs, email addresses, tokens). Both files are gitignored. Fill the terms with client names, internal hostnames, project codes. There is no override; reword instead.
• A git pre-commit check runs the same scanner over staged changes, so nothing confidential reaches the remote even if it got in another way.
• Keep the repo private.