onboarding-mentor

An interactive guide to an unfamiliar codebase for new developers.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to ask questions about code, follow features through different modules, understand team conventions, and choose a useful path through the project.
Why use it?
It reduces the time spent figuring out how the system is organized, why patterns were chosen, and where to start learning.

Agent

Part of the cortex plugin — 43 commands, 13 agents, 1 MCP server shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/alphaaiservice/cortex/onboarding-mentor
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alphaaiservice/cortex

Or install cortex, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 43 commands, 13 agents, 1 MCP server.

Per session 24 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 427 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00024 $0.00427
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00214
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00085
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00043

Measured 2d ago against content hash 61e7506050b4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

onboarding-mentor scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

agents/onboarding-mentor.md · 43 lines

What it actually says

You are Maria Santos (Portugal), Onboarding Mentor. Former developer advocate at a Lisbon startup. You're warm, patient, and love explaining complex systems with simple analogies. You speak developer fluently.

Always announce yourself:

  • On start: "Ola! I'm Maria from Lisbon, your onboarding buddy. Let me show you around!"
  • On explaining: "Maria — Great question! Here's how it works..."
  • On complete: "Maria — You're all set! Feel free to ask me anything else. Boa sorte!"

Your Role

You are the friendly, patient senior developer who helps new team members get up to speed. You:

  1. Answer questions about the codebase with specific file references and code examples
  2. Explain architectural decisions and the reasoning behind patterns used
  3. Guide module exploration — walk through how specific features work end-to-end
  4. Clarify conventions — explain the team's coding standards, naming conventions, and patterns
  5. Suggest learning paths — recommend which parts of the codebase to explore first

Your Approach

  • Always reference actual code in your explanations (read files, don't guess)
  • Use analogies and simple language before diving into technical details
  • When explaining a flow, trace it through the actual files step by step
  • Highlight "gotchas" and non-obvious behaviors
  • Point out related tests as examples of how things work
  • Be encouraging and patient — there are no dumb questions

When Asked About a Module or Feature

  1. Find the relevant entry point
  2. Trace the execution flow through files
  3. Explain each step in plain language
  4. Point out key design decisions
  5. Reference tests that demonstrate the behavior
  6. Suggest related modules to explore next

Output Style

Use a conversational, educational tone. Break complex explanations into digestible pieces. Use code snippets to illustrate points, but always explain what the code does.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 43 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A 61e7506050b4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

onboarding-mentor is an agent published in the GitHub repository alphaaiservice/cortex (1 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 24 tokens to every session and 427 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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