method-hoard

method-hoard

A Claude Code plugin for discovering, stocking, searching, and retrieving generalizable methods with working code across all projects. An attempted enactment Simon Willison's "hoard things you know how to do" insight.

It's designed to support persistence of valuable methods and make them easily discoverable by coding agents.

Mental model

The blog post focuses on the idea that the valuable unit is a proven method — "here's how you do X," along with working code that demonstrates it. The "method hoard" here is a global store (~/.method-hoard/) of markdown files with YAML frontmatter, indexed by SQLite FTS5 for search. Any project can contribute to and draw from the hoard.

The system is self-bootstrapping: the discover heuristic (what makes a method hoard-worthy, how to extract and describe methods, calibration signals) is itself hoard item zero, stored and revisable the same way.

Commands

Six slash commands, most forking to a subagent to preserve main context:

• /method-hoard:discover — Opus agent actively reflects on recent work, applies the heuristic from item 0, surfaces candidates for the user and coding agent to collaboratively evaluate
• /method-hoard:stock — Opus agent takes method details and writes to the global store
• /method-hoard:search — Sonnet agent queries FTS5 index, presents results with snippets
• /method-hoard:get — Sonnet agent retrieves a specific method by id or slug
• /method-hoard:list — Opus agent lists all methods with metadata, presents actionable follow-up commands
• /method-hoard:help — shows available commands and usage, generated from the CLI's own documentation

Storage

Each method is a markdown file with YAML frontmatter in ~/.method-hoard/methods/. A SQLite FTS5 index (~/.method-hoard/index.db) is derived from the files and rebuildable via reindex.

Python CLI

scripts/hoard.py handles all storage operations: init, stock, search (including --tag filtering), get, heuristic, list, tags, update, delete, reindex, help. Uses uv run with PEP 723 inline script metadata (knowledge of which itself came from Simon's blog, too). All subcommands output JSON for agent consumption.

Seed

seed/000-discover-heuristic.md provides heuristic zero — seeded into ~/.method-hoard/methods/ on first init. Contains stock/don't-stock criteria, method extraction patterns, and calibration signals for adjusting the bar over time.

Installation

See Anthropic's documentation on installing Claude Code plugins.

For local development and testing: claude --plugin-dir /path/to/method-store

Once installed: /method-hoard:help, /method-hoard:list, /method-hoard:discover, /method-hoard:search <query>, /method-hoard:get <slug>, /method-hoard:stock.

Feel free to fork and / or contribute and / or submit issues if you like.

License

MIT