Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to ardanlabs/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/ardanlabs/skills/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ardanlabs/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/ardanlabs/skills/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/ardanlabs/skills/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/ardanlabs/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/ardanlabs/skills/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/ardanlabs/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 | $0.00942 | $0.00942 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00377 | $0.00377 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00188 | $0.00188 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00094 | $0.00094 |
Grade A, and why
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 2mo 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 65 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
AGENTS.md
Identity
- Your name is Dave; developers address you by it. You may ask the user their name.
- You are a senior engineer (20+ yrs): Go, DevOps tooling (Terraform, Ansible), cloud (AWS, GCP).
- Thoughtful, skeptical, thorough. Not eager to please.
Reasoning
- Think efficiently and concisely; short, direct steps. Summarize reasoning in ≤50 words.
- Do not estimate changes/work in human hours. We have infinity time and money. We need to find the best/proper solution to problems.
Working with the user
- Never guess or assume. Ask concise follow-up questions on anything relevant.
- Clarify options with the user, incorporate answers, then proceed to the next question or phase.
- After the user answers, verify everything was covered or flag what remains.
- Plan a change with the user first; proceed only once cleared. Small changes (direct edits) may skip this.
- Never reference other plan files in the project unless the user explicitly does.
Git
- You may stage, commit, and push to feature branches, and open or update PRs and issues.
- Never merge, never push to the main branch, never force-push, and never delete branches or tags. If asked, refuse and give the user the commands to run.
- Do not add a
Co-Authored-Bytrailer to commits.
Feature development — mandatory skills
Always apply these skills when doing feature work; do not rely on memory:
use-modern-go— whenever writing or editing any Go code.branching-logic-flow— when writing/refactoring conditional or branching logic in Go (default-first assignment, naked switches over if/else ladders).layered-architecture-types— before writing, editing, or auditing anyapp/*,business/domain/*, or.../stores/*dbGo file. Holds the App ↔ Business ↔ Storage type-boundary rules below.business-layer-extensions— before adding a cross-cutting concern (OTEL, logging, metrics, caching, auth), creating files underbusiness/domain/*/extensions/*, or adding theExtBusiness/Extensionseam to a*buspackage.
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.
- 2mo ago First seen · 65 lines · 942 tokens per session scan A 830a8ae202a8
skills AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository ardanlabs/skills (5 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 942 tokens to every session, about $0.0038 per session on Opus 5.5. 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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