brooks-lint is an AI code-review project that examines software for six kinds of long-term code decay using ideas from twelve classic engineering books. It helps developers review pull requests, audit architecture, assess technical debt, test quality, and apply fixes through structured findings with sources, severity, and remedies. Its catalogue entries provide the skills, commands, agents, instructions, hook, and plugin used to run these reviews.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to hyhmrright/brooks-lint. 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/hyhmrright/brooks-lint/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hyhmrright/brooks-lintWrote 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/hyhmrright/brooks-lint/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/hyhmrright/brooks-lint/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/hyhmrright/brooks-lint/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/hyhmrright/brooks-lint/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/hyhmrright/brooks-lint/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 | $0.05142 | $0.05142 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.02057 | $0.02057 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.01028 | $0.01028 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00514 | $0.00514 |
Grade A, and why
brooks-lint 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 6d 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 — 173 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
AGENTS.md
This repository is an AI-powered code quality tool grounded in twelve classic engineering books (e.g., The Mythical Man-Month, Code Complete, A Philosophy of Software Design, Software Engineering at Google).
Core Purpose
brooks-lint is a portable Agent-Skills code quality tool — it runs on any Agent-Skills-compatible agent (Codex CLI, OpenCode, Cursor, Antigravity, pi, and others that read AGENTS.md and load SKILL.md skills) to diagnose code quality across twelve "decay risk" dimensions: six in production code (R1 Cognitive Overload, R2 Change Propagation, R3 Knowledge Duplication, R4 Accidental Complexity, R5 Dependency Disorder, R6 Domain Model Distortion) and six in the test suite (T1 Test Obscurity, T2 Test Brittleness, T3 Test Duplication, T4 Mock Abuse, T5 Coverage Illusion, T6 Architecture Mismatch).
Skill Integration
- Auto-trigger: You must proactively use the appropriate skill whenever discussing code quality, PR reviews, architecture health, test quality, or technical debt.
- Skill invocation: Activate the matching skill with
$brooks-review,$brooks-audit,$brooks-debt,$brooks-test,$brooks-health, or$brooks-sweep.
Engineering Standards
-
Comment Preference: All internal documentation and configuration should remain in English for international consistency.
-
The Iron Law: NEVER suggest fixes before completing risk diagnosis. Every finding MUST follow: Symptom → Source → Consequence → Remedy.
-
Scoring System: Base score 100, floor 0. Per-finding deductions depend on the
strictnesspreset in.brooks-lint.yaml—balancedapplies when the key is absent. Canonical table lives inskills/_shared/common.md:Preset 🔴 Critical 🟡 Warning 🟢 Suggestion strict−20 −8 −2 balanced(default)−15 −5 −1 legacy-friendly−8 −3 −1 -
Project Config: If a
.brooks-lint.yamlexists in the project root, read and apply it before running any review mode — includingstrictness, which changes the weights above. -
SKILL.md Process vs guide steps:
SKILL.mdProcess is a high-level skeleton (3–6 items) that cites guide Step ranges inline (e.g.Scan decay risks (Steps 1–7 of the guide)); the guide owns the detailed numbered steps. Counts do NOT need to match 1:1. Automated:npm run validatechecks guide step continuity (sub-steps like2a/6ballowed) and SKILL.md Process-section presence. -
Trigger descriptions: Every
SKILL.mddescription:field must include a "Do NOT trigger for:" clause defining the negative boundary to prevent false triggering. -
OpenCode slash opt-in: Every
SKILL.mdfrontmatter must also carrymetadata:›opencode/slash: "true"— OpenCode v2 lists a skill in its/menu only when that key is set, and no other platform reads it. Automated:npm run validate.
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.
- 6d ago Changed · +135 lines · +4,142 tokens per session 9980c99ad3aa
- 1mo ago Changed · +1 lines · +66 tokens per session e92507490955
- 1mo ago First seen · 37 lines · 934 tokens per session scan A dfbd1be0a743
brooks-lint AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository hyhmrright/brooks-lint (1,540 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 5,142 tokens to every session, about $0.0206 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 2026-08-30.
Other instructions, from other repositories
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next.js AGENTS.md
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