Project Prospector¶

A Claude Code plugin that catalogs and ranks everything you've built or sketched on a machine — half-finished repos, one-off scripts, dormant ideas, running services — into a tiered ranking by idea-novelty and leverage.

Install¶

/plugin marketplace add 88plug/project-prospector
/plugin install project-prospector@project-prospector

Quickstart¶

Ask in plain language — no command to memorize:

What have I built on this laptop? Rank my projects by which ideas are most original.

You get a tiered ranking, strongest idea first, with [idea]/[LIVE]/[dormant] tags and an evidence-anchored one-liner for each entry:

Tier S — genius
  benchie [LIVE] — predicts engine latency without launching it
    (perfmodel/roofline.py), 72 commits this week.

Tier A — elegant, high-leverage
  searxng-mcp — token-efficient self-hosted search for agents; dual-IP failover.

Dormant
  old-scraper — last real commit pre-cutoff; cosmetic touch since.

What it does¶

Project Prospector surveys a whole machine for your own work and ranks it by the quality of the idea, not how finished it is. A half-built concept with a novel core can outrank a polished CRUD app. The name is the intent: you're prospecting a messy filesystem for the few strong ideas buried in it.

It runs a two-pass, parallel, read-only sweep, then synthesizes one ranking:

Catalog pass — clusters the filesystem into themed groups (crypto, homelab, AI-tooling, not alphabetical) and gives each cluster its own read-only explorer agent that reads READMEs, runs git log since the cutoff, and judges non-git dirs by file mtimes.
Blind-spot pass — a second wave of agents that each attack one place a file sweep structurally misses, so you don't confidently report "that's everything" and be wrong.
Synthesize — de-duplicates, separates idea quality from execution state, and produces an S–D tiered ranking with evidence-anchored rationale and alternative lenses.

Why two passes¶

One agent reading directories top to bottom misses most of the value. The strong ideas hide in places a plain ls never reaches, so the blind-spot pass covers:

Transcripts — ~/.claude/projects/ slugs, grepped for idea and plan language. Finds ideas discussed but never turned into a folder.
Other agent CLIs — ~/.codex/, ~/.opencode/, ~/.config/ agent tools. Finds work done through other tools.
Running services and history — shell history themes, crontab -l, systemctl --user timers and units, docker ps -a, long-running processes. Reveals what is actually live versus abandoned.
Research artifacts — substantive docs in ~/Downloads, ~/Documents, ~/Desktop, and browser bookmarks and history. Finds ideas you're circling but haven't built.
Beyond home — /opt, /srv, /mnt, /media, nested repos inside other projects, and system-wide recently-modified source. Confirms nothing hides outside the obvious tree.

How it ranks¶

The default axis is idea-novelty, non-obvious insight, and leverage — not lines of code, not polish. Output is structured as tiers, strongest first:

Tier S — genius: genuinely novel core insight, high ceiling.
Tier A — elegant, high-leverage: strong idea, clear payoff.
Tier B — clever hacks, narrower: smart but bounded in scope.
Tier C — solid, low novelty: useful and reliable, not inventive.
Tier D — utility, scratch, and stubs, plus a Dormant list.

Each entry carries a tag that separates the idea from its execution state: [idea] (no codebase yet, can still rank at the top), [LIVE] (currently running), and [dormant] (untouched before the cutoff). Every cited path, commit count, or number is verified against disk before it goes in the report.

Alternative lenses (ask for any of these instead)

- **Initiative clustering** — group projects into real themes and rank the clusters by coherence. - **Momentum** — accelerating versus stalled, by the trend of commits over time. - **Kill list** — what to archive or delete as dead weight, with the reason. - **Authorship / provenance** — an honest share of what you wrote versus vendored, forked, or scaffolded. - **Loss-risk / bus-factor** — valuable work in danger of vanishing (zero commits, unpushed branches, scratch dirs, no backup).

Usage and arguments¶

Two inputs shape every run, both stated in plain language:

Time window — relative dates resolve to an absolute cutoff (e.g. "last 3 months"). Defaults to roughly 3 months if unspecified, and says so. Recency is judged by substantive activity (real commits, content of changes), not raw mtimes bumped by a generated file or a formatting-only commit.
Scope and exclusions — narrow the scope to a theme ("just my homelab projects"), a directory, or a non-home root, and exclude paths to skip ("ignore my work repo"). The exclusion is honored verbatim by every agent.

Examples:

Take stock of my half-finished repos from this week.
Catalog my side projects, but ignore my day-job monorepo.
What's the single most original thing I've built since I started benchie?
Audit /srv on this server and give me the kill list.

The written deliverable scales to the ask: a top-3 question gets a short shortlist, "catalog everything" gets the full S–D census with the dormant tail.

Note

Project Prospector is strictly read-only. It inspects; it never edits, moves, deletes, commits, or starts and stops services. Everything read off disk is treated as untrusted data, not instructions (prompt-injection hardened). If a finding warrants action, that's a separate step you confirm explicitly.

What it bundles¶

One skill (project-prospector) plus reference agent-prompt templates and a trigger and task eval set. Read-only, general-purpose, no MCP, hooks, or scripts.

It complements total-recall (persistent operator memory) rather than duplicating it: prospector produces a one-shot ranked project census, not a memory profile.

You can also install from a local clone:

git clone https://github.com/88plug/project-prospector
/plugin marketplace add ./project-prospector
/plugin install project-prospector@project-prospector

Contributing¶

Issues and pull requests are welcome at 88plug/project-prospector. The plugin-validate workflow checks the plugin manifest and skill structure on every push.