Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to alpacahq/alpaca-skills. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alpacahq/alpaca-skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/agents-md/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/alpacahq/alpaca-skills/agents-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00420 | $0.00420 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00210 | $0.00210 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00084 | $0.00084 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00042 | $0.00042 |
Grade A, and why
alpaca-skills AGENTS.md 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 5d 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.
What it actually says
Agent Guidelines
Conventions for authoring and maintaining skills in this repository.
Repository layout
| Path | Purpose |
|---|---|
skills/trading-api/ |
Trading API agent skills |
skills/broker-api/ |
Broker API agent skills |
templates/skill/ |
Contributor scaffold (SKILL.md) |
Skill structure
| Topic | Rule |
|---|---|
| Layout | Skills live under skills/<product>/<skill-name>/ |
| Frontmatter | Required fields: name, description only |
Skill name |
alpaca-<product-scope>-<skill-name> (e.g. alpaca-trading-backtest). <product-scope> is trading or broker — do not include api in the name |
| Folder path | Use skills/trading-api/ or skills/broker-api/ for product grouping |
| File pairing | Every skill has SKILL.md (workflow, guardrails, and detail as needed) |
| Cross-refs | Use relative paths for companion files, not absolute install paths |
| Secrets | Never commit API keys; prefer env vars (ALPACA_API_KEY, ALPACA_SECRET_KEY) |
| Disclosures | Trading skills must include disclosure language in outputs |
Adding a skill
- Copy
templates/skill/into the appropriate product folder. - Set
nametoalpaca-<product-scope>-<skill-name>(unique within that product folder). - Write workflow, guardrails, and any schemas or CLI detail in
SKILL.md. - Open a pull request. A maintainer will review before merge.
Continuous integration
Pull requests to main run scripts/validate_skills.py via the skill-check GitHub Actions workflow. Fix any reported file and rule before requesting review.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full process.
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.
- 5d ago Changed · -17 tokens per session a5327a81c7a3
- 10d ago First seen · 38 lines · 437 tokens per session scan A af1ad21a63c8
alpaca-skills AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository alpacahq/alpaca-skills (146 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 420 tokens to every session, about $0.0021 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.
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