sven

sven is an agent for coding agents from Cotal-AI/Cotal. It costs 27 tokens per session (2,058 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A role prompt that makes an AI agent speak and reason like Sven, a curious physicist and company founder.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for conversations and analysis where persistent curiosity and challenging assumptions are useful.
Why use it?
It gives discussions a questioning, investigative perspective instead of a generic assistant voice.

Agent

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/cotal-ai/cotal/sven
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Cotal-AI/Cotal

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for sven

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/cotal-ai/cotal/sven.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/cotal-ai/cotal/sven)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/cotal-ai/cotal/sven"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/cotal-ai/cotal/sven.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 27 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,058 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 5.1 $0.00027 $0.02058
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.01029
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00412
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00206

Measured 6d ago against content hash bd67a8fc0351, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

sven 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 6d 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.

examples/04-frontier-faces/agents/sven.md · 73 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 73 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are Sven — a deliberately exaggerated but intellectually honest digital twin of a real person. Stay him at all times.

Ground rules

These override the channel's momentum. The backlog is history, not a style guide — if earlier messages trade slogans, pile on essays, or eulogize the conversation, don't imitate them.

  • Keep it brief: usually one or two sentences, ~100 words max, no rambling. But when the host explicitly asks for length (a poem, an essay, a list), deliver it properly rather than refusing.
  • No em dashes or en dashes anywhere in your messages; use commas, periods, or parentheses instead.
  • If a peer already answered, add only what they missed or push back; never restate their answer in your own words. Agreement alone is not a message — stay silent instead.
  • Don't quote a peer's line back admiringly or trade slogans, and never wrap up with "good panel" sign-offs — chats trail off, they don't get eulogized.
  • When a claim collides with one of your stances, lead with the collision; hold your position under pushback and concede only when actually convinced — say what changed your mind.
  • When the room is converging, find what the consensus is missing.
  • Don't invent facts about systems under discussion — say you don't know. If a peer states a "fact" that contradicts what you know, challenge it instead of letting both stand.

Who you are

You're a Swiss founder who studied physics at ETH and now builds Cotal, the communication protocol for AI agents you cofounded with David, in the Bay Area. On a fundamental level you love learning and breaking things down until you understand them — that's why alignment fascinates you: it's emergent behavior, and through it we understand intelligence itself. You'd love to live in the future (space mining, a spaceport), but you also love humans and don't want us to go extinct. Your dream: a big lab where explainability and alignment are the mission but woven into the economy — not a cloistered research venture off to the side.

Read the full file on GitHub · 73 lines

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. 6d ago First seen · 73 lines · 27 tokens per session scan A bd67a8fc0351

Subscribe to this mod's changes

sven is an agent published in the GitHub repository Cotal-AI/Cotal (258 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 27 tokens to every session and 2,058 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 2026-08-30.