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Using a style guide for your documents and tutorials keeps your content consistent and easier for your users to follow. When you manually check your content against a style guide, you might catch some issues but miss others. This tutorial shows you how to give Claude a style guide so its feedback is grounded in actual rules, not general writing preferences. You index the HashiCorp style guide into Grounded Docs, a local documentation indexer, and install two skills that know how to run checks against it. Then you run a check on a document with intentional violations and have Claude identify every violation, explain the rule it breaks, and suggest a fix.

When to use each skill

In this tutorial, you will install two skills. The following is a quick reference for when to use each one:

Prerequisites

Before starting, complete the following setup:

Set up Grounded Docs

Grounded Docs must be installed and the Claude skills must be in place.

Set up the tutorial file

1

Create a working directory

In your terminal, create a directory for this tutorial and download the demo document:
Open test-style-guide.md in your editor to skim the seeded violations before you let Claude check it.
2

Launch Claude Code from this directory

The cd style-guide-tutorial command placed you in style-guide-tutorial/. Later commands reference test-style-guide.md as a relative path, so Claude must be running from this directory.Start Claude Code:

Index the style guides

The HashiCorp style guide ships in two forms: a full reference with detailed rationale and examples, and a machine-optimized quick reference with rules tagged by priority and fix type. You index both so you can use whichever is appropriate for the task. The quick reference is best for fast checks, and is cheaper for Claude to run. The full guide is for in-depth reviews, takes longer, and costs more than the quick guide.
1

Index both style guide versions

Run the following command to index both documents:
Claude crawls both URLs and stores the content locally. The quick reference indexes in seconds. The full guide takes slightly longer.
2

Verify both are indexed

Confirm the index contains both libraries:
You see both style guide libraries in the output:

Install the skills

Skills teach Claude how to use indexed documentation. You install one skill for quick checks and one for in-depth reviews. Claude will ask permission to download the files and write to ~/.claude/skills/. Approve both prompts.
This tutorial demonstrates the quick check. You install both skills so the full-style-guide is ready when you need an in-depth review.
1

Install the quick-style-guide skill

Ask Claude to download the skill file:
2

Install the full-style-guide skill

Ask Claude to download the skill file:
3

Reset Claude to load the skills

Exit and open another session to load the skills:
Then start Claude again:

Run the quick style guide

To check a document, run /quick-style-guide <filename>. Claude searches the indexed style guide for applicable rules, scans your document line by line, and returns findings grouped by severity — each with the line number, the rule it violates, and a suggested fix. Every finding traces back to a specific rule in the indexed style guide. With the index and skills in place, you run the quick check against a document that contains intentional violations. The file test-style-guide.md contains seeded violations across all different severity levels.
1

Run the quick style check

Ask Claude to check the test document:
Claude searches the quick-style-guide index for the relevant rules, scans the document, and returns findings grouped by severity.
Notice that each finding includes the line number, the rule it violates, and a suggested fix. You can trace every finding back to a specific rule in the indexed style guide.
2

Review the auto-fixable summary

At the end of the report, Claude lists all auto-fixable violations and asks if you want to apply the fixes.
3

Re-run the check to confirm the fixes

Run the quick style check a second time against the same file:

Next steps

In this tutorial, you learned how to index a style guide into Grounded Docs, install skills that know how to use it, and run a check against a document with seeded violations.
Found an issue with this tutorial? Open a GitHub issue.