presidio copilot-instructions.md

Repository guidance for developing and reviewing Presidio, a Python toolkit that finds and removes personal information from text and images.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when changing Presidio components, reviewing code, adding detection rules, or making security and privacy decisions.
Why use it?
It helps keep privacy processing accurate, secure, and compatible with existing users’ code and settings.

Instructions file for GitHub Copilot

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add instructions/data-privacy-stack/presidio/copilot-instructions
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/data-privacy-stack/presidio

Made for: GitHub Copilot.

Per session 1,679 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 1,679 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.01679 $0.01679
Opus 5 $0.00839 $0.00839
Sonnet 5 $0.00336 $0.00336
Haiku 4.5 $0.00168 $0.00168

Measured yesterday against content hash da9bc2a72f45, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

presidio copilot-instructions.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.

.github/copilot-instructions.md · 171 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 171 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Presidio Development & Review Instructions

Presidio is a Python-based data protection and de-identification SDK with multiple components for detecting and anonymizing PII (Personally Identifiable Information) in text and images.

Domain-specific rules live in path-scoped instruction files and apply on top of this file when a change touches the matching paths:

  • .github/instructions/recognizers.instructions.md — adding or modifying PII recognizers.
  • .github/instructions/yaml-config.instructions.md — the pydantic layer that translates YAML configuration into Presidio instances.

Core Philosophy

Data privacy is paramount. This is a PII detection and anonymization system used in sensitive contexts; security and correctness are non-negotiable.

  • Accuracy first: false negatives (missed PII) and false positives (incorrect detections) both damage trust.
  • Security by default: never log PII values, use non-reversible anonymization, validate all inputs.
  • Presidio is a library: changes to shared code alter results for users who wrote no new code. Backward compatibility is the prime directive.
  • Stateless design: modules that process records are stateless for scalability — avoid adding state.
  • Cross-component awareness: Presidio is a multi-component system; changes ripple across boundaries.
  • Documentation integrity: code and docs must stay synchronized — outdated docs are dangerous.

Backward Compatibility

Before changing anything outside a brand-new file, the PR description must state what existing behavior changes. These count as behavior changes even without a signature change:

  • Default values on shared base classes (None to [] changes truthiness for every subclass).
  • Properties on abstract interfaces — custom implementations inherit the new default and may break.
  • Anything altering which entities are returned, or their scores, for text that previously worked.

Prefer additive changes: new parameters get defaults preserving current behavior; public APIs are never broken without a deprecation path.

Read the full file on GitHub · 171 lines

Changes

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.

  1. yesterday First seen · 171 lines · 1,679 tokens per session scan A da9bc2a72f45

Subscribe to this mod's changes

presidio copilot-instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository data-privacy-stack/presidio (10,706 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 1,679 tokens to every session, about $0.0084 per session on Opus 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.

Related

Other instructions, from other repositories