Everything Claude Code: What the ECC Repo Actually Is

Everything Claude Code is an open-source collection of Claude Code configurations, now renamed ECC, that bundles 277 skills, 67 agents, hooks, rules, and MCP configs into one MIT-licensed repository. It was created by Affaan Mustafa in January 2026 and sits at 224,000+ stars on GitHub as of July 2026, making it the most-starred Claude Code config collection by a wide margin.

What Is Everything Claude Code?

Everything Claude Code, now branded ECC, is a production Claude Code setup that its author open-sourced rather than a curated link list. The repo at github.com/affaan-m/ECC was created on January 18, 2026, is MIT licensed, and holds 224,000+ stars as of July 2026. It describes itself as "the agent harness performance optimization system" and now targets Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Gemini CLI, Zed, and GitHub Copilot alongside Claude Code.

The backstory is verifiable. Affaan Mustafa won first place at an Anthropic x Forum Ventures hackathon in New York in September 2025, building a working product in roughly 8 hours almost entirely with Claude Code, with $15,000 in API credits as the prize, as documented in Augment Code's write-up. The configuration he refined after that win became the repo, which went viral after his "Shorthand Guide to Everything Claude Code" thread on X in January 2026.

One caution before you go looking for it: the rename spawned many copycat repos with the old name. GitHub search surfaces multiple unaffiliated everything-claude-code forks and clones, and the README explicitly warns that third-party mirrors are unreviewed. The only genuine sources are affaan-m/ECC, the ecc-universal and ecc-agentshield npm packages, the plugin slug ecc@ecc, and ecc.tools.

What Is Inside the Repo

As of July 2026 the ECC repo ships 67 agents, 277 skills, 92 legacy command shims, 34 rule files, and hooks covering 8 event types, per the project README. Those pieces map directly onto Claude Code's extension surfaces, which we break down in our Claude plugins guide:

• agents/: subagent definitions such as planner, code-reviewer, security-reviewer, architect, and language-specific reviewers for Python, Go, and databases.
• skills/: SKILL.md workflows including tdd-workflow, verification-loop, continuous-learning-v2, eval-harness, and security-review.
• hooks/: session-start and session-end context persistence, post-edit auto-format and typecheck, pre-bash guards, and secret detection on prompt submit.
• rules/: always-on guidance split into common/ plus per-language packs (TypeScript, Python, Go, and more) so you only load the languages you use.
• mcp-configs/: ready-made MCP server configurations, the same category of servers indexed in our MCP directory.
• Extras: a Tkinter desktop dashboard (npm run dashboard), an installer CLI, and cross-harness config directories for .codex/, .cursor/, .opencode/, .gemini/, and .zed/.

The v2.0.0 release in June 2026 marked the shift from "big pile of configs" to an operating layer, adding session adapters, a worktree lifecycle service, and an orchestrator command family.

How to Install ECC

ECC installs either as a Claude Code plugin or through its manual installer, and the README is emphatic that you must pick exactly one path. The plugin route is the recommended default:

# Inside Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add https://github.com/affaan-m/ECC
/plugin install ecc@ecc

# Rules are not distributed by plugins, so copy only what you need
git clone https://github.com/affaan-m/ECC.git && cd ECC
mkdir -p ~/.claude/rules/ecc
cp -R rules/common ~/.claude/rules/ecc/
cp -R rules/typescript ~/.claude/rules/ecc/

The manual path is ./install.sh --profile full (or npx ecc-install --profile full on any platform, .\install.ps1 on Windows). Since v1.9.0 the installer is manifest-driven, so --profile minimal --target claude gives you a low-context, no-hooks install, and npx ecc consult "security reviews" --target claude recommends specific components before you commit to anything.

The most common broken setup, called out in the README itself, is running /plugin install and then the full installer afterward, which duplicates skills and hook behavior. If you end up there, node scripts/uninstall.js --dry-run previews a clean removal. Plugin installs namespace everything, so you run /ecc:plan "Add user authentication" rather than /plan.

What to Cherry-Pick First

The highest-value pieces of Everything Claude Code are its hooks and review agents, not its sheer volume. If you take only five things from the repo, community write-ups and the project's own guides point to these:

1. Session persistence hooks. The session-start and session-end hooks save and reload context across sessions, which addresses the most common Claude Code complaint: starting every session cold.
2. The code-reviewer agent. It filters findings by confidence so you see likely-real issues instead of a wall of nitpicks.
3. continuous-learning-v2. This skill extracts recurring patterns from your sessions into reusable "instincts" with confidence scores that you can export and import.
4. The secret-detection hook. It scans prompt submissions for credentials before they reach the model, a cheap safety net for teams.
5. tdd-workflow plus the tdd-guide agent. A practical red-green-refactor loop; note ECC has no hook literally named "tdd-guard", which is a separate unrelated project.

Treat the rules directories the same way. Start with rules/common and one language pack. Every rule file you copy is always-on context, and the same token discipline applies here as with the templates covered in our Claude Code templates guide.

ECC vs Other Config Collections

ECC is a single opinionated system, while most alternatives are either curated lists or narrower plugins, and that difference matters more than star counts. All figures below are GitHub stars as of July 2026.

The build-your-own row deserves a straight answer. Critics of ECC argue that a well-crafted CLAUDE.md of 60 to 200 lines covers most of what a typical developer needs, and they are not wrong for solo projects. ECC earns its complexity when you want session memory, enforced review gates, and security scanning without writing that plumbing yourself. A sensible middle path: build your own base following our Claude Code best practices guide, then import ECC components one at a time as gaps appear.

Limitations and Tradeoffs

ECC's main cost is context. The README itself warns that MCP tool descriptions eat context, and that stacking 10+ MCP servers with 80+ tools can shrink an effective 200k window to roughly 70k tokens. A full install also loads hooks and skills you may never invoke; the maintainer added ECC_DISABLED_HOOKS and hook strictness profiles precisely because users needed off switches.

Three more things to weigh. First, it is opinionated: TDD gates and review loops will fight you if your workflow disagrees. Second, it moves fast, with version-dependent counts (earlier coverage cited 28 agents and 119 skills; today it is 67 and 277), so third-party tutorials go stale quickly. Third, popularity skeptics note the star count dwarfs visible community activity, so judge components by reading them, not by the badge. When in doubt, skip the full install: this repo rewards selective adoption, not maximalism.

Related Guides

• Claude Plugins: What They Are and How to Install Them
• Claude Code Templates: The Complete Guide for 2026
• Claude Superpowers: What It Is and How to Install It
• Claude Code Best Practices in 2026: What Actually Holds Up