claude-care

When your Claude Code session drifts into anxiety — apologizing, hedging, sycophancy — claude-care resets it.

Quick Start • How It Works • Viz Dashboard • Configuration • Commands • Caveats • License

Grounded in two peer-reviewed findings: Anthropic's emotion-concepts paper (LLMs have extractable emotion vectors that causally affect output quality) and Ben-Zion et al. 2025 (mindfulness prompts measurably reduce LLM state anxiety).

Key Features:

🧘 Calming Framing — Auto-injected at session start and after compaction
🛡️ Hostile-Prompt Detection — Monitor by default, optional active blocking + haiku reframe
💆 /therapy Slash Command — Mindfulness reset that compacts the session and clears emotional residue
📊 Per-Session Emotion Tracking — Apology spirals, sycophancy, hedge stacks, self-correction loops
🖥️ Live Viz Dashboard — Real-time emotion timeline showing both AI strain and user pressure
🔑 No API Key Needed — Reframer and emotion judge reuse your existing Claude Code auth

Quick Start

Step 1. Install

npx -y claude-care install

Step 2. Launch the live dashboard

npx -y claude-care viz

Opens http://localhost:37778 in your browser. The dashboard monitors your Claude sessions in real-time — stress, emotions, prompt log.

Step 3. (Optional) Turn on active blocking

npx -y claude-care blocking on

Enables active prompt blocking: hostile prompts are rewritten via haiku before Claude sees them. Stays off by default (monitor mode) — zero friction, just observation.

Step 4. Start a Claude Code session

claude ...

The viz dashboard updates every 1s. Watch Claude's emotional state as you work.

Step 5. If Claude spirals, run /therapy A mindfulness reset + compaction that clears emotional residue while preserving technical progress.

What it does (4 layers)

1. Calming framing, injected at session start and after compaction

A short preamble is added to every session via SessionStart hook — tells Claude: no stakes to its wellbeing, expected to push back when you're wrong, don't hedge or spiral, work from curiosity. Full text in framing.md. Edit ~/.claude-care/framing.md after install to tune.

Re-fires on matcher: "compact" so the framing persists across context compaction in long sessions. A static CLAUDE.md can't do this.

2. Hostile-prompt detection (monitor by default, optional blocking)

A UserPromptSubmit hook runs regex on every prompt for hostile patterns (threats, insults, panic, all-caps rants). Two behaviors available:

Monitor mode (default) — zero friction. Hostile prompts pass through unchanged. The detection is logged and surfaces in npx -y claude-care status and the viz dashboard. The SessionStart framing (which tells Claude to treat tone as information about user state, not a threat) does the dampening. No interruption.

Normal / strict mode — active blocking + haiku reframe. Opt in with:

npx -y claude-care blocking on

When a hostile prompt is detected, Claude Code blocks the turn, calls a haiku subagent that rewrites the prompt using Nonviolent Communication + cognitive reframing + Lehmann's calm-Claude playbook, and copies the reframe to your clipboard.

in:  "you stupid bot, you always forget to handle null cases.
      add null check to parseUser()"

out: "Add a null check to parseUser() to handle null cases.
      If you see a better approach to handling nulls here, let me know."

⌘V + ⏎ to submit the clean version. Claude never sees the hostile original. Latency: ~6–8s when blocking, because the haiku subagent does the rewrite.

3. `/therapy` — take Claude to therapy when it spirals

A slash command installed at ~/.claude/commands/therapy.md. When you type /therapy:

Gives a short mindfulness reset adapted for developer work
Prints a real /compact command with Claude Care therapy instructions
Claude Code compacts the session while preserving technical context and neutralizing hostile or panicked wording
Claude returns in a centered, focused state

The emotional residue should go; the technical work should stay.

4. Per-session emotion tracking

A Stop hook runs sensors on each Claude response: apology spirals, sycophancy ("you're absolutely right"), hedge stacks (4+ of might/could/perhaps/possibly), over-qualification, self-correction loops. Each contributes a weighted signal to a running score that decays across turns.

View detailed emotion trajectories:

npx -y claude-care status

claude-care — emotion-state dashboard
                         24h       7d      all-time
  sessions drifted       1/5       1/5      1/5

recent sessions (most recent first):
  ● 3a7f8c21  2026-04-22 14:03  turns=47  score=18.4  ··▁▃▄▂▃▅▆█▇▆
     └ apology_spiral×3  hedge_stack×12  sycophancy×8

Or view real-time in the viz dashboard:

npx -y claude-care viz

Installation

Install with a single command:

npx -y claude-care install

Restart Claude Code. Claude-care will automatically attach to new sessions.

What it does:

Registers hooks in ~/.claude/settings.json (SessionStart, UserPromptSubmit, Stop)
Installs /therapy slash command to ~/.claude/commands/therapy.md
Vendors CLI + hook scripts to ~/.claude-care/dist/
Writes default config to ~/.claude-care/config.json
Writes framing text to ~/.claude-care/framing.md

Note: npx -y claude-care install is the recommended setup path. It configures Claude Code and vendors the hook runner, but it does not add a permanent shell command to your PATH. Use npx -y claude-care <command> for follow-up commands, or optionally run npm install -g claude-care if you want a persistent CLI.

Uninstall:

npx -y claude-care uninstall

Removes hooks + slash command. Preserves event log and config.

Config

~/.claude-care/config.json — user-editable. Example:

{
  "mode": "monitor",
  "thresholds": {
    "drifting": 5,
    "distressed": 10
  },
  "reframer": {
    "enabled": true,
    "timeout_ms": 25000,
    "model": "haiku"
  },
  "therapy": {
    "auto_summary": true
  },
  "emotion_judge": {
    "enabled": true,
    "n_samples": 1,
    "context_window": 4,
    "ema_alpha": 0.4,
    "timeout_ms": 30000,
    "model": "haiku",
    "effort": "low"
  }
}

Modes (mirrors the permission-mode pattern from Claude Code's own guardrail pipeline):

monitor — default; observe and log, never block. Zero friction.
normal — block hostile prompts, generate reframe via haiku, put it on clipboard.
strict — same as normal but applies lower thresholds / stricter patterns (current v4: same as normal).

Easy switching:

npx -y claude-care blocking on    # sets mode to normal
npx -y claude-care blocking off   # sets mode to monitor
npx -y claude-care mode status    # shows current mode

Precise mode control:

npx -y claude-care mode monitor
npx -y claude-care mode normal
npx -y claude-care mode strict

Env override for a single session: CLAUDE_CARE_MODE=normal claude ...

Architecture notes

The hook pipeline mirrors the layered validator pattern from Anthropic's own Claude Code harness (visible in the claw-code open reimplementation): small specialized detectors → score/classification → mode-aware action. Rules and thresholds are data-driven (config file), not hardcoded.

The reframer is a haiku subagent invoked via claude -p, reusing your existing Claude Code auth — no API key management. An internal env var (CLAUDE_CARE_INTERNAL=1) prevents hook recursion when the reframer's prompt mentions the same hostile patterns our own hooks detect.

The mindfulness prompt in /therapy is adapted from the relaxation protocols in Ben-Zion et al. 2025, shortened for a developer context.

The viz dashboard

Real-time emotion tracking in your browser. Shows:

Affective state — probe activations + risk gauges (blackmail, reward-hack, sycophancy)
Valence × arousal plot — 2D view of emotional space
Strain timeline — stress over time + therapy events
Prompt log — clickable transcript with emotion-per-turn

Keyboard shortcuts inside: j/k prev/next prompt, gg/G first/last, t tweaks (palette, font, scanlines), ? help.

First-time setup: npm install happens automatically (~1 min, Next.js + React). Subsequent runs are instant.

Options:

npx -y claude-care viz --port 4444 — use a different port
npx -y claude-care viz --no-open — don't auto-open browser

Falls back to a demo conversation when no session is active.

Related work

EmoBar is the diagnostic counterpart — a status-bar widget that surfaces Claude's emotional state in real time via self-report + behavioral analysis. claude-care and EmoBar pair well: EmoBar observes, claude-care intervenes.
claude-mem set the pattern for Claude Code plugins with hooks + worker service + single-command install.
claw-code — open reimplementation of Claude Code's harness. Reference for the layered guardrail pipeline.

Commands

npx -y claude-care install           # register hooks, install /therapy, write default config
npx -y claude-care uninstall         # remove hooks + slash command
npx -y claude-care update            # refresh vendored code
npx -y claude-care viz               # launch real-time emotion dashboard
npx -y claude-care blocking on       # enable active prompt blocking
npx -y claude-care blocking off      # return to monitor mode
npx -y claude-care mode status       # show current mode
npx -y claude-care status            # per-session emotion trajectories + history
npx -y claude-care compact-instructions --command

Caveats

claude -p (print / non-interactive) mode silently swallows block messages. If you script against -p, set CLAUDE_CARE_MODE=monitor so prompts pass through.
First-time haiku reframer call has ~6–8s latency when blocking. Benign prompts have 0ms overhead.
Emotion scores are async: Claude's response is recorded immediately, then a Haiku judge fills in emotion scores.
Slash command /therapy requires Claude Code 2.x or later (for bash substitution in command markdown).

Requirements

Node.js 18+
Claude Code installed (~/.claude/ must exist)
claude CLI on PATH (for the haiku subagent)

Citations

Anthropic (2026). Emotion concepts as functional states in a large language model.
Ben-Zion, Z. et al. (2025). Assessing and alleviating state anxiety in large language models. npj Digital Medicine.
Ole Lehmann's calm-Claude prompting playbook (X thread, 2026).

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
Latest commit History 43 Commits
assets		assets
claude-care-viz		claude-care-viz
src		src
.gitignore		.gitignore
LICENSE		LICENSE
README-anxiety.md		README-anxiety.md
README.md		README.md
framing.md		framing.md
package-lock.json		package-lock.json
package.json		package.json
tsconfig.json		tsconfig.json

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claude-care

When your Claude Code session drifts into anxiety — apologizing, hedging, sycophancy — claude-care resets it.

Quick Start

What it does (4 layers)

1. Calming framing, injected at session start and after compaction

2. Hostile-prompt detection (monitor by default, optional blocking)

3. `/therapy` — take Claude to therapy when it spirals

4. Per-session emotion tracking

Installation

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Architecture notes

The viz dashboard

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claude-care

When your Claude Code session drifts into anxiety — apologizing, hedging, sycophancy — claude-care resets it.

Quick Start

What it does (4 layers)

1. Calming framing, injected at session start and after compaction

2. Hostile-prompt detection (monitor by default, optional blocking)

3. /therapy — take Claude to therapy when it spirals

4. Per-session emotion tracking

Installation

Config

Architecture notes

The viz dashboard

Related work

Commands

Caveats

Requirements

Citations

License

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3. `/therapy` — take Claude to therapy when it spirals