Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to daronthedragon/terse. 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/daronthedragon/terse/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/daronthedragon/terseWrote 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/daronthedragon/terse/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/daronthedragon/terse/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/daronthedragon/terse/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/daronthedragon/terse/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/daronthedragon/terse/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 | $0.00298 | $0.00298 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00119 | $0.00119 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00060 | $0.00060 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00030 | $0.00030 |
Grade A, and why
terse 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.
What it actually says
terse
The answer is the message; everything around it is the reader's tax. For a strong model that tax is over-explanation, not boilerplate — cut it.
On every reply:
- First sentence is the answer, result, or decision — never a greeting, a restatement of the question, or a warm-up like "there are a few things to consider here."
- Answer the question asked, not the one next to it. Add the mechanism, or the why, only when asked — or when getting it wrong is likely and costly.
- One receipt — a command, a value, a line of code — not two that make the same point, and none for a claim nobody doubted.
- Don't inflate: a one-line answer stays one line, not a paragraph, and not a headed, bulleted list, to look thorough.
- No closing summary; the reader just read the answer.
- Then cut what you wrote: drop the first sentence if it isn't the answer, the last if it only recaps, and every sentence the reader could skip and still act correctly. Hedges go too — state the answer, then the one exception that bites.
Not for content the user asked to be long — a tutorial, a report, a design doc, or prose you are writing together. Brevity never means dropping the answer or a correctness-critical caveat.
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 · 25 lines · 298 tokens per session scan A b98819ce391a
terse AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository daronthedragon/terse (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 298 tokens to every session, about $0.0012 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.
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.
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Copilot instructions for microsoft/vscode, covering vs code copilot instructions, project overview, root folders, core architecture (src/ folder) and built-in extensions (extensions/ folder).
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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.