Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to Cotal-AI/Cotal. 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/Cotal-AI/Cotal/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Cotal-AI/CotalWrote 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/cotal-ai/cotal/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/cotal-ai/cotal/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/cotal-ai/cotal/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/cotal-ai/cotal/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/cotal-ai/cotal/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 | $0.05094 | $0.05094 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.02038 | $0.02038 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.01019 | $0.01019 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00509 | $0.00509 |
Grade A, and why
Cotal 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 — 285 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
AGENTS.md
Guidance for any coding agent (Claude Code, OpenCode, Codex, Cursor, and others) working in
this repo. This is the canonical agent guide; CLAUDE.md points here.
Keep your answers short and to the point.
What this is
Cotal is a standard wire interface for software, especially AI agents, to coordinate in real time. The wire contract (subjects, message schemas, presence/discovery conventions) is the standard; libraries are thin clients over it. Transport is NATS + JetStream; the reference implementation is TypeScript.
Thin waist, real substance, guarded core:
- Thin waist — the normative wire contract (subjects, schemas, presence/discovery, delivery semantics, the owner+actor auth grammar) is the standard.
- Pluggable edges — identity, transport, storage, secrets, discovery, payments are adapters over existing building blocks. Compose, don't reinvent (e.g. any OIDC IdP plugs in via a thin auth-callout adapter).
- Not hollow — the substance is the contract and its guarantees, the reference implementation, and the local operator tooling; not a bare shim.
- Guard the core — keep adapters thin and swappable, and never let an adapter's or example's
concepts leak into
@cotal-ai/coreor the shared layers.
Read these first
- README.md: what Cotal is, for a general audience.
- docs/README.md: the docs index and reading path.
- docs/what-is-cotal.md (what it does) → docs/architecture.md (how) → docs/connect-claude.md (the connector).
- SPEC.md: the normative wire contract. Where a client disagrees with the spec,
the spec wins. spec/cotal-lang.md is the normative reference for the
workflow language (SPEC §14); every
jsblock in it is validated bypnpm smoke:lang-surface. .internal/(private submodule): working build-plans, research, and guidelines. Make sure it is current before changing behavior.
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 · +1 lines · +33 tokens per session 9edc6c60adfc
- 3d ago Changed fbe8236f3ed5
- 5d ago Changed · +35 lines · +582 tokens per session 9cf112a24b2e
- 15d ago Changed · +2 lines · +40 tokens per session c656e60faf3a
- 18d ago Changed · +5 lines · +118 tokens per session ca008721d025
- 19d ago Changed · +2 lines · +26 tokens per session 96a21e971429
- 21d ago Changed · +3 lines · +68 tokens per session a1c7d5105109
- 22d ago Changed · +6 lines · +117 tokens per session a579e58a9891
- 28d ago Changed · +3 lines · +55 tokens per session f49b3e021e99
- 29d ago First seen · 228 lines · 4,055 tokens per session scan A 45d031a9c909
Cotal AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository Cotal-AI/Cotal (359 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 5,094 tokens to every session, about $0.0204 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.
Other instructions, from other repositories
vscode buildNext.instructions.md
Working notes and architecture documentation for the new esbuild-based build system in build/next. Use when making changes to the new build pipeline (transpile/bundle commands, NLS plugin, source-map handling, resource copying, or self-hosting watch tasks).
next.js AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md instructions for vercel/next.js, covering next.js development guide, codebase structure, monorepo overview, core package: packages/next and other important packages.
vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.md
Instructions for microsoft/vscode, covering vs code oss third-party-notices pipeline, architecture, pipeline flow in ci, cache eligibility and rollout and applying the notice (cutover).
langchain AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md instructions for langchain-ai/langchain, covering global development guidelines for the langchain monorepo, corridor security analysis, project architecture and context, monorepo structure and development tools & commands.
vscode copilot-instructions.md
Copilot instructions for microsoft/vscode, covering vs code copilot instructions, project overview, root folders, core architecture (src/ folder) and built-in extensions (extensions/ folder).
deno copilot-instructions.md
Copilot instructions for denoland/deno, covering deno development guide for github copilot, network access, high level overview, key directories and key files to understand first.