Shaping Frame is a Claude Desktop skill that tracks epistemic weight during complex working sessions. It makes the difference between a hypothesis, a decision, and an unvalidated AI proposal explicit — surfacing only when something is crossing a threshold without your approval.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/XxYouDeaDPunKxX/shaping-frame-for-claude/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
Quickstart
Install the skill and activate it in Claude Desktop in under five minutes.
Core Concepts
Understand epistemic weight, source classes, and the weight state machine.
Reference
Full reference for the skill package, inline tags, and checkpoint formats.
Guides
Practical guidance for working sessions, long conversations, and avoiding drift.
The problem Shaping Frame solves
In any complex Claude session — designing a system, drafting a spec, shaping a workflow — ideas accumulate weight silently. A Claude-generated suggestion gets referenced twice. A model assumption enters a draft as if it were decided. An imported document starts being treated as operator intent. This is silent promotion: material advances from hypothesis to premise to constraint to decision without any explicit approval from you. Shaping Frame creates friction at those crossings. It tracks the provenance and weight of every active element, fires a checkpoint when material is about to cross an epistemic boundary, and stops before writing structural artifacts that contain unvetted content.How it works
Install the skill
Upload
shaping-frame.skill to Claude Desktop via Settings → Skills → Create skill → Upload a skill.Add the custom instruction
Copy the contents of
CUSTOM_INSTRUCTION.txt into Settings → Instructions for Claude. This anchor tells Claude to run the skill as a full active frame, not summarize it.Start a working session
Open a new conversation. The frame is active from turn one. It tracks source classes (OP, EXT, AI, MP, DSK), weight states (Spark → Crystallized), and fires checkpoints at defined thresholds.
Shaping Frame does not produce output on every turn. It surfaces only when material crosses a threshold or when a surface trigger fires (direction change, new constraint, phase shift). Silence is the normal state.