internals-book-volume

Neuroimaging Internals — Claude Code plugin

A Claude Code plugin that packages the internals-book-volume skill: a workflow for writing one volume at a time of a line-by-line, beginner-friendly teaching book about a real open-source neuroimaging codebase (FreeSurfer, FSL, SPM, AFNI, ITK, ANTs, niivue, and the rest of the program). Each volume is a ~30–40pp A4 LaTeX PDF that walks through a representative program function by function, quoting every listing verbatim from a local git clone with real file:line numbers, and teaching the underlying language (C, C++, Python, MATLAB, R, TypeScript) from scratch.

What's inside

plugins/internals-book-volume/
├── .claude-plugin/plugin.json     # plugin manifest
├── skills/internals-book-volume/  # the skill (SKILL.md + assets/ + reference/)
└── commands/internals-book-volume.md   # the /internals-book-volume slash command

• Skill — auto-triggers when you ask things like "write the next volume of the AFNI internals book", "continue the FreeSurfer book", or "scaffold a new internals book series for MRtrix3". It encodes the full workflow: scaffold a series (shallow-clone the source, build the book dir + SERIES.md + shared preamble.tex), write the next ☐ volume against the real clone, grep a LaTeX-pitfalls checklist, build with pdflatex twice, and flip the volume's status in the roadmaps.
• Command — /internals-book-volume [series] invokes the skill explicitly.

Install

From inside Claude Code, add this repo as a plugin marketplace and install:

/plugin marketplace add <your-github-user>/<this-repo>
/plugin install internals-book-volume@neuroimaging-internals

(Or, for local testing before pushing: /plugin marketplace add /Volumes/Niels_mac/Cpp_imaging/internals-book-volume-plugin.)

Without the plugin system

The skill is a plain folder, so you can also just drop it straight into your skills dir:

git clone <this-repo> /tmp/nbi
cp -R /tmp/nbi/plugins/internals-book-volume/skills/internals-book-volume \
      ~/.claude/skills/internals-book-volume

As an MCP server

MCP has no "skill" primitive, so the skill can't be an MCP skill. Instead, the bundled server at plugins/internals-book-volume/mcp/server.py exposes the same content through MCP primitives, for use from any MCP client (Claude Desktop, IDEs, etc.):

• a prompt internals_book_volume (optional series argument) that injects the full workflow, and
• five resources — internals://preamble, internals://main-template, internals://conventions, internals://latex-pitfalls, internals://skill — serving the template and reference files verbatim.

It runs via uv with inline (PEP 723) dependencies, so no manual install is needed. Self-check:

uv run --script plugins/internals-book-volume/mcp/server.py --selfcheck

Register in Claude Code (user scope, absolute path):

claude mcp add internals-book-volume -s user -- \
  uv run --script /abs/path/to/plugins/internals-book-volume/mcp/server.py

Or project scope — open this repo as your project and Claude Code picks up the included .mcp.json automatically.

Claude Desktop — add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "internals-book-volume": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["run", "--script", "/abs/path/to/plugins/internals-book-volume/mcp/server.py"]
    }
  }
}

Requires uv on PATH.

Requirements

• A LaTeX toolchain (pdflatex) with the tcolorbox, tikz, listings, fancyhdr, titlesec, and microtype packages.
• git (for the shallow source clones).
• The book program lives under /Volumes/Niels_mac/Cpp_imaging; adjust paths in the skill if you relocate it.

License

Choose one (e.g. MIT) before publishing.