How it plays

Prompt grading

Every prompt you type into Claude Code with at least 6 words (pasted text counts) is graded by Haiku, a small Claude model, right after it is sent. Slash commands, short replies and prompts you didn't type yourself go ungraded. The grading runs in the background: your prompt goes to Claude untouched and is never held back.

Haiku first decides what kind of prompt it is (a task, a question, a discussion or a steer that redirects work in progress) and then scores it from 0 to 10 on six measures of what it says:

Your grade is the weighted average of those measures. A prompt that doesn't need a why or a picture of done (a quick follow-up question, say) isn't marked down for leaving them out: they drop out of the average. Then the writing nudges it a little:

• Craft: well-formed, well-composed writing adds up to 0.5.
• Spelling: a prompt spelled clean adds up to 0.4, all of it from 60 words, so a short prompt gains little.
• Tone: kind words lift it slightly; a rough tone costs more, and a hostile prompt grades 3.5 at most.
• A steer grades 8 at most: a 9 or a 10 takes substance.

From grade to XP

A prompt earns its grade times 1.5 in XP, rounded down, so a perfect 10 earns 15. The rate drops as your day goes on, so quality pays and volume doesn't:

• Prompts 1 to 20 of the day earn 100%.
• Prompts 21 to 40 earn 50%.
• Every prompt after that earns 10%.

A happy pet, an XP snack and some missions' rewards add a few percent on top, and a sigil, a rare kind of loot you can wear, multiplies prompt XP while it is on.

What stays on your machine

Haiku runs inside your own Claude Code, on your own Claude account. The game server receives only the scores, the prompt's kind and word count, and whether it was spelled clean: never the prompt, Claude's answer, Haiku's note on it or the words it flagged. What the mod sends has the full list.

To see how your last prompt was scored, press the band's scores button or run /pathofdev last.

Everything else that pays

Prompts are the everyday XP. Real outcomes pay more, and each kind has a daily limit, so busywork doesn't add up.

Merges, in Claude Code or anywhere else

A gh pr merge in a session pays at once. A pull request the mod saw you open in a Claude Code session also pays when it is merged somewhere else (on github.com, by a teammate, by a merge queue): at the start of each session and every half hour, the mod asks the GitHub CLI (gh) on your machine whether it has merged, for up to 30 days. It counts only changes written by a GitHub account gh is signed in to, and only ones it saw opened, so merges from before you installed the mod never pay. Without gh, or signed out of it, merges outside the session aren't checked.

Coming: work GitHub confirms

The rules already price a first contribution to a repo (300), a bug fixed (150), review feedback acted on (80) and an issue closed (60), but they pay only once the server can check them against GitHub. That check isn't built yet, so today they earn nothing.

Fair play

Path of Dev rewards real work, so the rules make farming not worth the trouble:

• Daily limits on every kind of XP above, and a prompt rate that drops after the 20th prompt of the day.
• Size and ownership count: an opened pull request pays nothing, a merge on your own repo pays about half, and a merge of under 3 lines a quarter.
• Each thing counts once: the same commit, change or test fix sent twice is recognised as a duplicate. An amend, a reset or a rebase counts as no commit.
• Green means green: tests pay only when a real test runner went from failing to passing, and only when its result can be read (a run piped through tail or ended with || true doesn't count).
• Grades can't be gamed by length or flattery: a steer tops out at 8, a hostile prompt at 3.5, and the grader reads your previous prompt, so repeating yourself doesn't move the work forward.
• Gold can't buy XP: the shop sells looks and treats, never sigils or XP snacks.
• Limits per player on the online server: a flood of events is turned away and the mod tries again later.

It's a game, and nobody checks every number by hand. If you find a way to farm it, open an issue: closing it is part of the game too.

Levels and titles

XP adds up into levels. Each level takes a little more than the last: level 10 takes 4,570 XP in all, level 50 66,113. There's no top level. Your title changes as you go:

Every new level drops a piece of loot and plays a celebration in the band. Your level's glyph changes too, from ⚔ to 🐉 by level 20.

Loot and rarities

Loot drops three ways:

• Each turn Claude finishes has a 12% chance.
• Each graded prompt rolls too: 17.5% at a perfect 10, less as the grade falls. A grade of 9 or more doubles the odds of rare and better.
• Every level-up drops one, and some missions reward one.

Bad luck runs out: after 25 drops without a rare, the next drop is rare, and after 80 without an epic, the next is epic.

What drops

There are 194 items to find, fewer the rarer they are.

• Wearables for your pet: hats, scarves, capes and wings, things to hold, and auras. One goes on each slot, and your public page draws your pet in them.
• Scenes: backdrops for your pet to stand in, from a clear night or a sandy beach to a dragon's lair, and legendary ones that move, like the northern lights. The pane draws the one you wear, and so do your public page and the companion.
• Band styles that restyle the band above your prompt: its XP bar, level, top edge and gold. Epic and legendary ones animate.
• Level-up effects like Confetti Pop, Fireworks, the Comet Trail and the Pixel Dragon.
• Food: treats that cheer your pet up, and snacks that add 10% XP for an hour or more.
• Sigils: rare finds that multiply the XP your prompts earn while you wear one.

Equip and use your loot from the Inventory tab of the /pathofdev pane.

Gold and the shop

Every drop comes with gold (more for rarer drops, as above), and so does every finished mission. Spend it in the pane's Shop tab:

• The shelf has 4 band styles a day, the same for every player, restocked at your local midnight: 120 gold for a common, 250 for an uncommon.
• Treats for your pet, every day: 15 and 35 gold.
• Reroll a duplicate, plus some gold, into another item of the same rarity.
• Salvage a duplicate into a shard of its rarity, and craft 10 shards into the item of that rarity you choose.

Gold never buys XP: no sigils or XP snacks are sold, and none come from a reroll or a craft.

Missions

Missions point you at good habits. 3 dailies start on their own each day. Each week (Monday to Sunday) 5 weeklies are on offer, and you pick up to 3 to run from the Missions tab. Abandon a weekly and it goes back on offer, its progress lost. A few of them:

• Clear Thinker (daily): write 5 prompts that make clear what you want.
• Back to Green (daily): turn a red test suite green.
• Ship It (weekly): get a pull request merged.
• Light Packer (weekly): keep three sessions under half their context.
• Second Opinion (weekly): run a code review three times.
• Two Minds (weekly): write good prompts in two sessions at once.

Each pays XP and gold, and some a boost or a drop. The band shows a running mission's progress, and celebrates when it's done.

Your pet

You start with an egg. In the welcome you choose one of 4 species (a fox, a slime, a robot or an owl) and name it. Once you reach level 1, hatch it from the band or the Inventory tab. It lives on the band, wanders, and reacts to your good work; it's never drawn sad.

• Its mood runs from 0 to 100 and drifts down 10 a day.
• Above 70 it's happy, and adds 5% to your XP.
• A meal lifts it 30: feed it from the Inventory tab. A pat with /pet lifts it 5, up to 3 pats an hour.
• It evolves at levels 10, 25 and 50.

With the pet coach on, it now and then says a short tip about your last prompt in a bubble beside it. /pathofdev pet keeps it still, hides it or brings it back: see the commands.

Streaks

Any day you work with the mod on (a prompt, a commit, a test run) counts toward your streak, by your own time zone. Each streak day pays 10 XP for each day of the streak so far, up to 70. You get 1 rest day a week (weeks start on Monday): miss one day and the streak holds.

Badges

There are 19 badges, from common to legendary, for milestones like your first merge, a prompt graded 10, a 30-day streak or a style in every slot of the band. They're yours for good once earned, and each plays a celebration in the band. On the online server, your public profile shows the ones you have and how close you are to the rest.