Does it work?

We gave Claude Code the same coding work with no rules, with the rules pasted into CLAUDE.md, and with stele. Then we counted how often the rules were respected.

No rules	Rules in CLAUDE.md	stele
33%	63%	100%

Speed

The hook adds about 0.1 s per write on Windows. With 500 rules, it adds up to 0.17 s.

See for yourself

Every experiment is in the stele repository, including the runs where stele lost.