Use it as a mandatory prerequisite for Azure governance discovery and infrastructure planning when policy assignments, effects, or inherited management-group rules must be known.

Azure policies can be inherited and may differ from what a basic lookup shows. Using incomplete or guessed rules can lead to deployment failures.

How jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator configures GitHub Copilot

Q: What is apex-accelerator governance-discovery.instructions.md?

Rules for discovering Azure Policy constraints from the live Azure environment or an approved scheduled snapshot. It requires stopping when policy information cannot be retrieved instead of making assumptions.

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/main/.github/instructions/governance-discovery.instructions.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator

Made for: GitHub Copilot.

Wrote 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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/governance-discovery/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/governance-discovery)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/governance-discovery"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/governance-discovery/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/governance-discovery"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/governance-discovery.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 713 This file is loaded in full into every session.

When invoked 713 The same file — it is already loaded in full.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00713	$0.00713
Opus 5	$0.00357	$0.00357
Sonnet 5	$0.00143	$0.00143
Haiku 4.5	$0.00071	$0.00071

Measured 9d ago against content hash af371ef67e53, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

apex-accelerator governance-discovery.instructions.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 9d 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.

.github/instructions/governance-discovery.instructions.md · 77 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 77 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Governance Discovery Instructions

CRITICAL: Governance constraints MUST come from the live Azure environment — either directly through discover.py during the current run, or indirectly through the approved scheduled workflow baseline generated from live Azure and committed under .github/data/governance-policy-baseline.json.gz. GATE: This is a mandatory gate. If Azure connectivity fails or policies cannot be retrieved during live discovery, STOP and inform the user. Do NOT generate governance constraints from assumptions. Do NOT accept arbitrary static files as governance input — only the approved workflow output file (.github/data/governance-policy-baseline.json.gz) is valid for cached baseline mode.

Why This Matters

Assumed governance constraints cause deployment failures. Example:

Assumed: 4 tags required (Environment, ManagedBy, Project, Owner)
Actual: 9 tags required via Azure Policy
Result: Deployment denied by Azure Policy

Management group-inherited policies are invisible to basic queries. Use REST API (not az policy assignment list) to capture all inherited policies.

Discovery Is Delegated to Subagent

Discovery runs inside an isolated subagent invoked via #runSubagent. The subagent:

Verifies Azure connectivity via ARM token
Queries ALL policy assignments via REST API (including MG-inherited)
Drills into Deny/DeployIfNotExists definitions to verify actual impact
Classifies effects and returns a structured report

The authoritative output contract is defined in tools/schemas/governance-constraints.schema.json.

DO NOT read the subagent's .agent.md file into the parent agent's context. Doing so defeats context isolation and causes the parent to execute the subagent's internal script inline instead of delegating. Treat the subagent as opaque — interact with it only via #runSubagent.

Fail-Safe: If Discovery Fails

If the subagent returns PARTIAL or FAILED status:

Read the full file on GitHub · 77 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.

9d ago First seen · 77 lines · 713 tokens per session scan A af371ef67e53

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apex-accelerator governance-discovery.instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator (50 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 713 tokens to every session, about $0.0036 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.

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apex-accelerator: Instructions file for GitHub Copilot