plankton

Write-time code quality enforcement for AI coding agents, built on Claude Code hooks.

[!CAUTION] Research project under active development. Hooks are tested against Claude Code >= 2.1.50 (see badge). Newer CC versions usually work but are not guaranteed. Disable CC auto-updates to prevent silent breakage (see Quick Start). If you encounter issues, file a report including the output of claude --version. To pin to a specific Plankton version: git checkout v0.1.0.

quick start

git clone https://github.com/alexfazio/plankton.git
cd plankton
pip install uv && uv sync --all-extras
claude                # hooks activate automatically

That's it. Plankton works by being the directory you run Claude Code from. The hooks in .claude/hooks/ are picked up automatically — no install command, no plugin, no config. Clone, cd, claude.

[!TIP] You can work on any codebase from inside plankton. Just tell Claude: "work on /path/to/my-project" — it will apply the same quality enforcement to that codebase while the hooks stay active.

[!NOTE] Existing codebases: the agent edits a file, Plankton enforces every violation in it, pre-existing included. Messy files get cleaned up on first touch. After that, they're fast. Scope it down with exclusions:

"exclusions": ["tests/", "legacy/", "vendor/", "node_modules/"]

Recommended: disable Claude Code auto-updates. Plankton depends on undocumented CC internals — a silent auto-update can break hooks without warning.