State of Claude Code Setups — March 2026

Every month, developers submit their Claude Code setups to jeanclaudecode.ai for analysis. The scorer reads your CLAUDE.md files, hooks, skills, agents, rules, and plugins — and returns a structured score with recommendations. This report aggregates 847 submissions from March 2026.

No survey, no self-reporting. The data comes directly from the configs themselves.

March 2026 at a glance

• 847 setups analyzed
• 4.3/10 average score (month-over-month trend: data accumulating)
• Scoring covers six dimensions: hooks, skills, agents, rules, commands, and plugins

Feature adoption

How many setups use each feature — and whether it correlates with a higher score.

Feature	Adoption	Avg with	Avg without	Delta
Hooks	12%	6.8	2.1	+4.7
Skills	31%	6.1	2.8	+3.3
Agents	24%	6.4	2.9	+3.5
Rules	38%	5.7	2.3	+3.4
Commands	45%	5.2	2.6	+2.6
Plugins	8%	7.1	3.0	+4.1

A large delta means the feature genuinely separates strong setups from weak ones — not just that power users happen to use it.

Archetype distribution

• Vanilla — 45% (381 setups) █████████
• Prompt Engineer — 24% (203 setups) █████
• Automator — 17.9% (152 setups) ████
• Power User — 13.1% (111 setups) ███

The archetype is assigned based on the combination of features present and the overall setup maturity. "Vanilla" means no meaningful configuration beyond defaults.

Score distribution

• 0-2 — 30% (254) ▪▪▪▪▪▪
• 2-4 — 32% (271) ▪▪▪▪▪▪
• 4-6 — 22% (186) ▪▪▪▪
• 6-8 — 12% (102) ▪▪
• 8-10 — 4% (34) ▪

The distribution is right-skewed: most setups cluster in the 0-4 range, with a long tail of high-scorers. Crossing the 6/10 threshold typically requires at least two configured feature categories.

Key findings

• plugins users score 7.1/10 on average — the highest correlation of any feature, yet only 8% of setups use it.
• commands is the most widely adopted feature at 45% — but adoption doesn't translate to mastery, with an average score of 5.2.
• 45% of setups are "Vanilla" — no meaningful configuration beyond defaults. The setup gap between vanilla and power users is real and large.
• The score floor matters: plugins has the lowest adoption (8%) but the highest score delta (+4.1) — the highest-effort, highest-reward feature.
• Power users are rare at 13.1% — but they likely represent the ceiling of what Claude Code setups can achieve today.

What this means for your setup

The data is consistent across months: hooks are the single highest-leverage investment. They're low adoption, high reward — the perfect candidate for the next thing you add to your Claude Code setup.

If you're in the "Vanilla" bucket, the fastest path to improvement is adding a CLAUDE.md file with explicit instructions in your project root. That alone moves most setups from the 0-2 range to 3-5.

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Analyze your own setup and contribute to next month's report at jeanclaudecode.ai. The scorer is free, takes under 60 seconds, and gives you a breakdown by feature category with specific improvement suggestions.