Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to howells/scaffold. 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/howells/scaffold/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/howells/scaffoldWrote 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/howells/scaffold/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/howells/scaffold/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/howells/scaffold/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/howells/scaffold/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/howells/scaffold/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 | $0.00418 | $0.00418 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00167 | $0.00167 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00084 | $0.00084 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00042 | $0.00042 |
Grade A, and why
scaffold 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 today.
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
Scaffold
The house baseline for starting or standardising a project: repo shape, stack, package boundaries, deployment and launch checks. It is a standard, not a template.
docs/ is the source of truth. skills/scaffold is a distribution surface generated from it. Start at docs/README.md and open only the page the task needs. Deviations live in docs/adr/.
Generated, never hand-edited
docs/principles.mdcomes fromsrc/content/principles.tsviapnpm generate:principles.skills/scaffold/references/comes fromdocs/viapnpm sync:skill. Edit the docs, then sync.pnpm testruns both with--check, so a docs edit without a regenerate fails.
Editing
- Baseline policy goes in
docs/reference/; project-specific guidance belongs in that project'sAGENTS.md. Search before adding a page. - Terms in
GLOSSARY.md(Scaffold Baseline, Project Docs, Agent Skill, Agent Skill Distribution, Skill Wrapper) are fixed. - Lint config trap: see
docs/reference/config-snippets.mdbefore wiring lint anywhere. - Production deploys are local (
pnpm deploy:prod: vercel pull, build and deploy --prebuilt); nothing ships from hosted CI. - Don't overwrite others' uncommitted work.
Commands
pnpm dev (docs site), pnpm typecheck, pnpm lint, pnpm lint:fix, pnpm build, pnpm test.
Agent skills
Issue tracker
Linear, workspace howells, team Howells (key HOW), through the linear-howells MCP server. See docs/agents/issue-tracker.md.
Triage labels
Default triage labels. See docs/agents/triage-labels.md.
Domain docs
Single-context. See docs/agents/domain.md.
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.
- today Changed · +14 lines · +83 tokens per session 4e17b1947392
- yesterday Changed · -8 lines · -191 tokens per session a1733cf908a5
- 1mo ago Changed · -13 lines · -372 tokens per session de8989a5a63e
- 1mo ago Changed · +1 lines · +187 tokens per session ee6f638221e5
- 2mo ago First seen · 44 lines · 711 tokens per session scan A e0d33d05d0c4
scaffold AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository howells/scaffold (2 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 418 tokens to every session, about $0.0017 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.
scaffold AGENTS.md compared with instructions from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| scaffold AGENTS.mdhowells/scaffold | Instructions file | 2 | today | MIT | A | 418 | Codex, OpenCode |
| vscode buildNext.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode | Instructions file | 195k | yesterday | MIT | A | 9,719 | GitHub Copilot |
| next.js AGENTS.mdvercel/next.js | Instructions file | 143k | yesterday | MIT | A | 7,461 | Codex, OpenCode |
| langchain AGENTS.mdlangchain-ai/langchain | Instructions file | 149k | yesterday | MIT | A | 4,680 | Codex, OpenCode |
| vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode | Instructions file | 195k | yesterday | MIT | A | 5,516 | GitHub Copilot |
| vscode copilot-instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode | Instructions file | 195k | yesterday | MIT | A | 3,093 | GitHub Copilot |
| deepseek-harness AGENTS.mddeepseek-ai/deepseek-harness | Instructions file | 274k | 2d ago | MIT | A | 4,313 | Codex, OpenCode |