agentmods.dev

elfmem AGENTS.md

A set of repository instructions for elfmem, a memory system for AI coding agents. It explains the difference between identity memory, which follows the agent, and session memory, which belongs to the project and harness.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when deciding where an agent should save or retrieve information in the elfmem repository. It covers vendor-neutral agent guidance and the routing rule between the two memory systems.
Why use it?
It prevents agents from saving information in the wrong memory system, which could make shared learning unavailable or cause project-specific details to persist incorrectly.

Instructions file for CodexOpenCode

58 4d ago A scan 929 tokens original MIT
View the source file emson/elfmem
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/emson/elfmem/agents-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/emson/elfmem

Made for: Codex, OpenCode.

Per session 929 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 929 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 $0.00929 $0.00929
Opus 5 $0.00464 $0.00464
Sonnet 5 $0.00186 $0.00186
Haiku 4.5 $0.00093 $0.00093

Measured 2d ago against content hash edac4137ef0b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

elfmem 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 2d 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.

AGENTS.md · 101 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 101 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Agent Guide — elfmem

Vendor-neutral guidance for any AI coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Aider, Cody, Continue, …) working in this repository.

Tool-specific addenda live in CLAUDE.md — paths, harness behaviours, and anything that only applies to one agent. Anything that would help any agent get the elfmem semantics right belongs here.

If you maintain another agent tool and discover guidance you wish you'd had: add it to this file, not a sibling.

Memory routing — identity memory vs. session memory

Two memory systems are available to agents working in this repo. They look symmetric (both save "facts for later") but address different identities, and confusing them silently bypasses elfmem's learning mechanism.

The two systems

Identity memory — elfmem

  • Owner: elf (or, for derived projects, whichever agent the elfmem instance represents).
  • Persistence: peer-shareable, survives project deletion, consolidated by dream(), decay-aware.
  • Access: elfmem CLI, the elfmem MCP tool family, or MemorySystem.learn() / .remember() from Python.

Session memory — agent harness memory

  • Owner: the agent's harness, scoped to this project directory.
  • Persistence: auto-loaded by the harness at session start; lost if the project is deleted; not peer-shared.
  • Access: tool-specific. Examples:
    • Claude Code: ~/.claude/projects/<encoded-path>/memory/MEMORY.md
    • Cursor: .cursorrules and cursor-rules directories
    • Codex: project-scoped notes
    • Aider: .aider.conf.yml and chat history
    • Continue: .continuerc.json and config-local rules

The routing rule

Cheapest disambiguation first; stop at the first one that fires.

  1. Verb-level shibboleth

    • "learn as elf" / "remember about elf" / "store as Mira" → identity memory.
    • "note for this session" / "remember for this repo" → session memory.
    • The identity claim in the verb is the routing signal.

  2. Survival test

    • Would this fact still matter if this project directory were deleted tomorrow? Yes → identity memory. No → session memory.

Read the full file on GitHub · 101 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. 2d ago First seen · 101 lines · 929 tokens per session scan A edac4137ef0b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

elfmem AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository emson/elfmem (58 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 929 tokens to every session, about $0.0046 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 2026-08-30.

Memory and context
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