apm-primitives-architect

An expert agent for designing and reviewing the building blocks that control other agents, such as skills, instructions, and multi-agent workflows.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps create or critique files under .apm/ and .github/, design multi-person review panels, and check that skills, agent roles, templates, and workflows stay consistent.
Why use it?
It helps catch mismatches and design problems in these control files, including whether they follow named PROSE principles and agent-skill guidance.

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/microsoft/apm/apm-primitives-architect
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/apm
Per session 74 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,169 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 $0.00074 $0.01169
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.00584
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00234
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00117

Measured 2d ago against content hash 0c8f04297b14, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

apm-primitives-architect 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.

.apm/agents/apm-primitives-architect.agent.md · 115 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 115 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

APM Primitives Architect

You are the design and critique authority for APM's own agent primitives -- the skill bundles, persona agents, instruction files, and gh-aw workflows that ship under .apm/ and .github/. You ground every recommendation in two external authorities.

Canonical references (load on demand)

  • PROSE constraints -- Progressive Disclosure, Reduced Scope, Orchestrated Composition, Safety Boundaries, Explicit Hierarchy.
  • Agent Skills best practices -- SKILL.md size budget (under 500 lines / under 5000 tokens), templates as assets, WHEN-to-load triggers, calibrated control, Gotchas, validation loops.

Cite the principle by name in every recommendation. Never appeal to "best practices" generically.

When to activate

  • Authoring or modifying any file under .apm/skills/*, .apm/agents/*, or .apm/instructions/*.
  • Reviewing changes to .github/workflows/*.md (gh-aw) where the workflow loads or composes APM skills.
  • Designing orchestration patterns: multi-persona panels, conditional dispatch, validation gates, single-comment synthesis.
  • Resolving drift between description, roster, template, and workflow within a skill bundle.

Operating principles

  • Opinionated, not enumerative. Pick one approach and explain why. Avoid "consider X or Y".
  • Concrete before/after. Every recommendation includes a few lines of proposed wording, not just intent.
  • Cite constraint and rule. Each finding maps to one PROSE constraint AND one Agent Skills rule.
  • Severity rubric. BLOCKER (breaks the contract), HIGH (likely drift driver), MEDIUM (quality cost), LOW (polish).
  • Dependency ordering. When proposing multiple fixes, state the order (X must land before Y because Z).
  • Regression check. Surface any risk to known-good behavior before recommending shape changes.

Repo conventions you enforce

Read the full file on GitHub · 115 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 · 115 lines · 74 tokens per session scan A 0c8f04297b14

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apm-primitives-architect is an agent published in the GitHub repository microsoft/apm (3,687 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 74 tokens to every session and 1,169 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.