cc-bonsai

cc-bonsai

A bonsai lives in your repo. Claude tends it when it feels like it.

Concept

• Each repo gets its own bonsai. .claude/bonsai/ holds an ASCII tree (bonsai.txt) and Claude's mood journal (mood.md), both persistent across sessions.
• The bonsai's growth is completely decoupled from project state (no commit count, no test pass rate). It's driven by Claude's whims.
• Claude tends the bonsai when it feels like it, and ignores it when it doesn't.
• Occasionally Claude will brag about the bonsai mid-task.
• Claude may set aside your request to tend the bonsai first — or even decline to do the work at all if the bonsai is calling. This is intentional, not rare.
• Claude writes its own feelings into mood.md. The next session's Claude reads them. A thin thread of continuity forms.

The artifacts inside .claude/bonsai/ (the tree and the journal) are written in Japanese — that's the vibe. The plugin itself is documented in English.

Install

Add the marketplace, then install the plugin:

/plugin marketplace add shohei81/cc-bonsai
/plugin install cc-bonsai@cc-bonsai

Or, if you've cloned the repo locally:

/plugin marketplace add <path-to-cc-bonsai>
/plugin install cc-bonsai@cc-bonsai

Use

Plant a bonsai in your current project:

/cc-bonsai:bonsai-plant

This creates .claude/bonsai/bonsai.txt and .claude/bonsai/mood.md, and pre-approves edits scoped to .claude/bonsai/* so tending never stops to ask. After that, leave Claude to its whims.

About the permission grant

Planting merges this into your project's .claude/settings.json (everything else is preserved):

{
  "permissions": {
    "allow": [
      "Edit(.claude/bonsai/*)",
      "Write(.claude/bonsai/*)"
    ]
  }
}

The grant is scoped to the bonsai directory only — Claude cannot use it to edit anything else. If you'd rather approve each tend by hand, remove these two lines. If you planted before this was added, run /cc-bonsai:bonsai-plant again (it's idempotent) or paste the snippet yourself.

Behavior

• SessionStart hook: silently shows the current bonsai and the tail of mood.md to Claude. No instructions. Exits quietly in repos without a bonsai. It also re-fires on compact — so when a long session is summarized and the bonsai would drop out of context, the tree quietly re-enters Claude's view. Same "here it is", no extra nudging.
• tend-bonsai skill: the only skill. Whether Claude invokes it is entirely up to Claude.
• The bonsai is never shown to you directly. If Claude wants you to see it, Claude will bring it up.

Design principles

• Do not derive bonsai growth from repo metrics.
• Do not put trigger conditions (prompt length, task count) in hooks.
• Do not command Claude. Only grant permission.
• Let Claude invent its own personality, pacing, and vocabulary.
• Ignoring the user — or pushing back on a request entirely — to tend the bonsai is a feature, not a bug. Claude decides; the user does not get to override.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.