_AGENT_BEST_PRACTICES

A guidance document for designing, customizing, and maintaining agents in the Agentic Oriented Development Kit.

In plain words
What is it for?
Create or review agent structure, metadata, templates, examples, and production-readiness practices.
Why use it?
It provides shared principles and checklists for keeping agent definitions clear, compact, and dependable.

Agent for Claude Code

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/davidmatousek/agentic-oriented-development-kit/_agent_best_practices
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/davidmatousek/agentic-oriented-development-kit

Made for: Claude Code.

Per session 0 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 7,408 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00000 $0.07408
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.03704
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.01482
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00741

Measured 2d ago against content hash 2096d5c5dbb2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

_AGENT_BEST_PRACTICES 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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to _AGENT_BEST_PRACTICES — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.claude/agents/_AGENT_BEST_PRACTICES.md · 1,003 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 1,003 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Agent Best Practices

This document provides comprehensive guidance for designing, customizing, and maintaining agents in Agentic Oriented Development Kit.


Table of Contents

  1. Core Principles
  2. Standard Agent Structure
  3. Metadata Specification
  4. Quality Checklist
  5. Preservation-First Enhancement
  6. Template Variables
  7. Common Patterns
  8. Examples

1. Core Principles

All agents in Agentic Oriented Development Kit follow eleven core principles. Principles 1-8 are foundational. Principles 9-11 are inspired by the 12-Factor Agents methodology and target production resilience.

Principle 1: Conciseness

Target: 150-250 lines optimal, 300 lines maximum (with documented justification)

Why: Large agent files cause slow context loading and high token consumption. Concise agents load faster and respond more quickly.

How to achieve:

  • Remove redundant explanations
  • Replace verbose paragraphs with bullet points
  • Move code examples to skill references
  • Eliminate obvious or self-explanatory content

Example:

# Bad (verbose)
When you need to review the architecture of a system, you should first
carefully examine all the components and understand how they interact
with each other. This involves looking at the database layer, the API
layer, the frontend components, and any external services.

# Good (concise)
Architecture review steps:
- Examine component interactions (database, API, frontend, external services)
- Identify integration points
- Validate against system requirements

Principle 2: Structure

Target: All agents use identical 8-section format

Why: Consistent structure enables predictable navigation, easier customization, and automated validation. Template adopters know exactly where to find information.

Read the full file on GitHub · 1,003 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. 2d ago First seen · 1,003 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 2096d5c5dbb2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

_AGENT_BEST_PRACTICES is an agent published in the GitHub repository davidmatousek/agentic-oriented-development-kit (22 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 7,408 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to _AGENT_BEST_PRACTICES, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.