canary

Canary 🐦

when the bird stops singing, stop trusting the output

Canary is a context health monitor for Claude Code. It makes Claude end every single reply with a small bird and a counter:

[🐦:1]
[🐦:2]
[🐦:3]

That's the whole idea. The bird is a canary in the coal mine for your context window.

What's "context degradation"?

The longer a chat runs, the more stuff Claude has to hold in its head - your files, your earlier messages, its own answers. At some point the window fills up and older details get squeezed out or summarized. When that happens Claude quietly starts forgetting things, repeating itself, or drifting off the task.

The problem is you usually can't see it happening. The answers still look confident.

Canary gives you something to watch. Claude is told to put the bird at the end of every reply and count up by one each time. As long as the bird shows up and the number keeps climbing in order, the instruction is still holding and context is healthy.

When the bird vanishes, repeats a number, or resets - that's your early warning. The instruction fell out of context, which means other things are falling out too. Time to start a fresh session.

The catch (and the fix)

The skill asks Claude to emit the bird — but a model losing context is exactly the one that forgets to. So Canary also ships a Stop hook: a small script that runs outside the model after every reply, checks the transcript for [🐦:N], and warns you itself if the bird is missing, stuck, reset, or skipped. The check doesn't depend on the thing it's checking. Requires Node 18+ (only used when installed as a plugin via the marketplace).

Before / after

Without Canary:

Sure — I've updated the function to handle the null case.

With Canary:

Sure — I've updated the function to handle the null case.

[🐦:7]

Same answer. One extra line. But now you know the bird is still alive at reply seven - and you'll notice the moment it isn't.

Install

Via Claude Code marketplace

/plugin marketplace add ahmedawaadd/Canary
/plugin install canary

Via curl (one-liner)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ahmedawaadd/Canary/main/install.sh | bash

That's it. Start a chat and watch the bird.

License

MIT