Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to AS-FOSS/mandible. 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/AS-FOSS/mandible/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AS-FOSS/mandibleWrote 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/as-foss/mandible/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/as-foss/mandible/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/as-foss/mandible/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/as-foss/mandible/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/as-foss/mandible/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 | $0.05467 | $0.05467 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.02187 | $0.02187 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.01093 | $0.01093 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00547 | $0.00547 |
Grade A, and why
mandible 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 4d 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 — 403 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
AGENTS.md — working agreements for AI agents in this repo
Read this before touching code. Every rule a script can check is a pointer to that script. What is left is prose, because no lint can catch it.
Precedence: docs/design.md is the design authority, so it says what to build and
why. This file is the operational authority, so it says how to work here.
CONTRIBUTING.md is for humans. If this file and docs/design.md disagree about
design, docs/design.md wins and you should fix this file.
1. The invariant that defines the project
No per-tool logic, ever. No
if tool == "docker", no tool-name-keyed special case in any extraction tier, no per-tool patch file vendored into this repo.
Tool-specific knowledge lives in exactly one place: user-local override files
under ~/.config/mandible/overrides/, which are never committed here. (Spec
revision 3 deleted the vendored catalog that used to be the second place — a
per-tool catalog is per-tool knowledge relocated into data, and it cannot stay
current with the tool actually installed. Parsing is keyed by framework now:
see spec §7 Tier A′ and mandible-extract/src/help_text/profile.rs, where
adding a framework is one match arm plus one fingerprint.)
If a tool renders badly, the fix is a better general parser, a new general tier, or an honest low-confidence badge in the UI. It is never a special case. This is the entire reason the tiered architecture exists; one exception starts the erosion that the architecture was built to prevent.
2. Hard limits
Every number here is enforced, and none of them is a law of nature. Changing one is a decision, and a decision goes in docs/design.md §16.
| Limit | Number | Enforced by |
|---|---|---|
Code lines in a .rs file before mod tests |
800 | scripts/shape_guard.sh |
| Lines in a function | 150 | clippy.toml, clippy::too_many_lines |
| Cognitive complexity of a function | 30 | clippy.toml, clippy::cognitive_complexity |
| Lines in one comment block | 12 | scripts/shape_guard.sh |
| Comment lines over code lines in a file | 0.5 | scripts/shape_guard.sh |
| Tools that show a parser shape recurs (reported, not gated) | 5 | xtask sweep-diff, read by a human |
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.
- 4d ago Changed · +15 lines · +275 tokens per session d6c30fd485f2
- 11d ago Changed · +7 tokens per session 721718eb8ea9
- 18d ago Changed · +5 lines · +82 tokens per session 4a3e93e43701
- 25d ago Changed · +2 lines · +31 tokens per session 5d0ec65a67ac
- 1mo ago Changed · +9 lines · +119 tokens per session b4f69abd56bd
- 1mo ago Changed · -1 tokens per session 0dc9667ba51a
- 1mo ago Changed · +2 lines · +33 tokens per session 66d4348e3040
- 1mo ago Changed · +3 lines · +56 tokens per session 9cd231afac1a
- 2mo ago Changed · +6 lines · +124 tokens per session 2d2eeb2495b6
- 2mo ago First seen · 361 lines · 4,741 tokens per session scan A e96e1d2a64ae
mandible AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository AS-FOSS/mandible (227 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 5,467 tokens to every session, about $0.0219 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 2026-08-30.
mandible AGENTS.md compared with instructions from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mandible AGENTS.mdAS-FOSS/mandible | Instructions file | 227 | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 5,467 | Codex, OpenCode |
| vscode buildNext.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode | Instructions file | 195k | yesterday | MIT | A | 9,719 | GitHub Copilot |
| next.js AGENTS.mdvercel/next.js | Instructions file | 143k | yesterday | MIT | A | 7,461 | Codex, OpenCode |
| langchain AGENTS.mdlangchain-ai/langchain | Instructions file | 149k | yesterday | MIT | A | 4,680 | Codex, OpenCode |
| vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode | Instructions file | 195k | yesterday | MIT | A | 5,516 | GitHub Copilot |
| vscode copilot-instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode | Instructions file | 195k | yesterday | MIT | A | 3,093 | GitHub Copilot |
| deepseek-harness AGENTS.mddeepseek-ai/deepseek-harness | Instructions file | 274k | 2d ago | MIT | A | 4,313 | Codex, OpenCode |