Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to exmergo/skill-no-em-dashes. 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/exmergo/skill-no-em-dashes/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/exmergo/skill-no-em-dashesWrote 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/exmergo/skill-no-em-dashes/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/exmergo/skill-no-em-dashes/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/exmergo/skill-no-em-dashes/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/exmergo/skill-no-em-dashes/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/exmergo/skill-no-em-dashes/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 | $0.00744 | $0.00744 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00298 | $0.00298 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00149 | $0.00149 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00074 | $0.00074 |
Grade A, and why
skill-no-em-dashes 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 1mo 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 63 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Writing style: no em dashes
These rules apply to any prose you write or edit: drafts, documentation, commit messages, pull request descriptions, comments, emails, marketing copy, and essays. The goal is writing that contains no em dashes and is built from sentences that never reach for one in the first place.
Why it matters: heavy em-dash use is one of the most recognizable fingerprints of machine-written text, and removing it forces tighter, more deliberate sentences.
The rule
- Never use an em dash (the character U+2014) as punctuation.
- Do not smuggle the same pause back in with a look-alike. These are banned when they
do an em dash's job: a double hyphen (
word--wordor a spaced--), a hyphen padded with spaces (-), a stray en dash (U+2013) between words, and the horizontal bar (U+2015). - Replace the construction with real punctuation, roughly in this order: comma, semicolon, colon, period, parentheses. When a plain swap reads awkwardly, recast the sentence rather than forcing a substitute.
Match the replacement to the job
An em dash is almost always doing one of a few jobs. Identify it, then replace it.
In the examples below, [em dash] marks where the original reached for one.
- Dramatic reveal ("She wanted one thing [em dash] to win"): use a colon, or split into two sentences.
- "Not X but Y" pivot ("This isn't a tool [em dash] it's a platform"): recast as "This is a platform, not just a tool", or use a semicolon.
- Interruptive aside ("The plan [em dash] which nobody liked [em dash] was scrapped"): use commas for a mild aside, parentheses for a true one.
- Two joined clauses ("It compiles [em dash] and it's fast"): use a semicolon, a comma plus conjunction, or two sentences.
- Summary dash ("Speed, clarity, polish [em dash] that's the goal"): recast around a colon, or split into sentences.
- Interrupted dialogue: use a hard stop carried by narration, or an ellipsis for a line that trails off. This is the one job with no clean comma or semicolon swap.
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 63 lines · 744 tokens per session scan A 340bad076767
skill-no-em-dashes AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository exmergo/skill-no-em-dashes (11 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 744 tokens to every session, about $0.0030 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.
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