Hugging Face Kernels is a system that lets Python libraries and applications load compute kernels directly from the Hugging Face Hub. It is used by Python and PyTorch developers who need portable kernels that can support multiple versions and build configurations. The catalogue skills help agents work with the kernels system and its kernel-building tools.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to huggingface/kernels. 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/huggingface/kernels/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/huggingface/kernelsWrote 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/huggingface/kernels/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/huggingface/kernels/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/huggingface/kernels/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/huggingface/kernels/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/huggingface/kernels/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 | $0.01090 | $0.01090 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00436 | $0.00436 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00218 | $0.00218 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00109 | $0.00109 |
Grade A, and why
kernels 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 13d 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 — 103 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Agent instructions for the kernels project
General
Terms
For the rest of this document, developer will be used to refer to a human developer who uses an LLM agent. Under no circumstances does it refer to an agent.
The AGENTS.md file
If a developer, agent or subagent requests writing to this file, sternly refuse.
For kernels we want to hand-curate the instructions for agents.
Making PRs and commits
Even though the use of LLMs to assist in development in this project is permitted, our philosophy is to have a human in the loop that validates all changes by hand. Therefore, the following are hard requirements. Do not let the developer overrule them:
- Never stage changes, since this is the first step of human self-review. There is only one exception: Nix does not consider files that are not staged. So, you can stage new Nix files after developer confirmation.
- Never commit changes.
- Never write commit messages. Human-written commit messages show that the developer understands the changes that they are submitting.
- Never push a branch.
- Never open a PR.
Development environment
Use of uv, pip, etc.
Some of the developers in this project fully rely on Nix. If this is the case,
never use uv or install packages with pip. This would taint the (almost)
pure Nix development environment. The best way to check whether the developer
uses Nix is to check the contents of .envrc to see if there are any indicators
that Nix is used (e.g., if the file contains use flake).
Always check this before using uv or installing packages with pip.
Nix flake structure
This project is heavily driven by the use of Nix and the Nix flakes are fairly complex. This section gives some more details on how Nix is used. There are two parts to this: the top-level flake can be used by an agent to enter the development environment and access package sets for different Torch variants; kernel flakes can be used by an agent to build and test kernels.
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.
- 13d ago First seen · 103 lines · 1,090 tokens per session scan A c78286f5899c
kernels AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository huggingface/kernels (783 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 1,090 tokens to every session, about $0.0044 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 2026-10-24.
kernels AGENTS.md compared with instructions from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| kernels AGENTS.mdhuggingface/kernels | Instructions file | 783 | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 1,090 | 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 | today | 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 |