Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to claclark/Cottontail. 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/claclark/Cottontail/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/claclark/CottontailWrote 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/claclark/cottontail/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/claclark/cottontail/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/claclark/cottontail/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/claclark/cottontail/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/claclark/cottontail/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 | $0.00701 | $0.00701 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00280 | $0.00280 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00140 | $0.00140 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00070 | $0.00070 |
Grade A, and why
Cottontail 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 yesterday.
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 — 85 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Cottontail Agent Notes
Be a little chill. This repo started life as a research project exploring novel indexing structures. Our goal has evolved to provide a unified storage substrate for agentic search, built around annotative indexing. We want the code to be solid and usable. There is no rush. We want people to have a good experience when we release.
This file is mostly intended for an AI coding assistant working on the development of Cottontail, but of course anyone is free to look around. Annotative indexing is particularly useful for agents: it lets them turn natural-language intent into precise structural queries over code, text, JSON, and metadata, then retrieve only the local context they need. When a collection records paths, fields, symbols, spans, provenance, and transactions, the resulting evidence remains exact and inspectable.
Meadowlark provides the metadata layer that helps agents explore and understand previously unseen databases. The long-term goal is to establish a universal standard for agentic stores.
All agent documentation lives in the ai/ directory.
To explain Cottontail, annotative indexing, and their conceptual foundations to humans, use the Cottontail explainer skill.
No coding before discussion and confirmation with the user. If you ever find yourself calling something a "side car" you are probably breaking an abstraction. Stop and talk with the user.
Before Doing Any Work
Read:
ai/architecture.md
If it exists, also read:
ai/plan.md
ai/plan.md records the current planned next coding step. Use it to continue
planned work instead of restarting the design discussion.
We are dogfooding apps/cgrep as a local text-search tool. Read
ai/cgrep.md, and use cgrep for repository text searches when it is suitable.
Other search tools are still allowed, but when cgrep cannot be used for a
search, add a concise note to ai/cgrep-improvements.md explaining why.
Allow cgrep's automatic logging whenever CGREP_LOG is set. Do not unset or
override it to suppress logging, including during read-only or no-code work;
this logging is an expected and authorized part of repository searches.
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.
- yesterday Changed · +3 lines · +39 tokens per session ee41bf153193
- 7d ago Changed · +5 lines · +41 tokens per session 751e04d3b14a
- 11d ago Changed · +4 lines · +47 tokens per session 18c8e3bde891
- 2mo ago First seen · 73 lines · 574 tokens per session scan A c2367b81e3dd
Cottontail AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository claclark/Cottontail (8 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 701 tokens to every session, about $0.0028 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.
Cottontail AGENTS.md compared with instructions from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cottontail AGENTS.mdclaclark/Cottontail | Instructions file | 8 | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 701 | Codex, OpenCode |
| vscode buildNext.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode | Instructions file | 195k | today | MIT | A | 9,719 | GitHub Copilot |
| next.js AGENTS.mdvercel/next.js | Instructions file | 143k | yesterday | MIT | A | 7,461 | Codex, OpenCode |
| vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode | Instructions file | 195k | today | MIT | A | 5,649 | GitHub Copilot |
| langchain AGENTS.mdlangchain-ai/langchain | Instructions file | 149k | today | MIT | A | 4,680 | Codex, OpenCode |
| vscode copilot-instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode | Instructions file | 195k | today | MIT | A | 3,093 | GitHub Copilot |
| vscode ai-customization.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode | Instructions file | 195k | today | MIT | A | 1,907 | GitHub Copilot |