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.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/main/.github/instructions/no-hardcoded-counts.instructions.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jonathan-vella/apex-acceleratorWrote 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/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/no-hardcoded-counts)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/no-hardcoded-counts"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/no-hardcoded-counts/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/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/no-hardcoded-counts"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/no-hardcoded-counts.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 | $0.00396 | $0.00396 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00158 | $0.00158 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00079 | $0.00079 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00040 | $0.00040 |
Grade A, and why
apex-accelerator no-hardcoded-counts.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 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.
What it actually says
No Hard-Coded Counts
Hard-coded entity counts drift silently.
Rule
NEVER hard-code counts of agents, subagents, skills, instructions, validators, workflow steps, VS Code extensions, or MCP tools in prose, tables, or comments.
What to Do Instead
Use descriptive language that stays true regardless of count changes:
| Instead of | Write |
|---|---|
| "16 top-level agents and 11 subagents" | "a set of specialized agents and subagents" |
| "25 instruction files" | "instruction files with glob-based auto-application" |
| "7-step workflow" or "8-step workflow" | "the multi-step workflow" |
Apply the same pattern to skills, validators, pricing tools and extensions.
When Exact Counts ARE Needed
Reference tools/registry/count-manifest.json as the single source of truth. Validators
auto-compute actual values from filesystem globs defined in that file.
Files allowed to contain counts (the allowlist):
tools/registry/count-manifest.json— the manifest itselfCHANGELOG.md— historical entries describe what changed at a point in timeQUALITY_SCORE.mdChange Log column — historical records of state changes- Validator script output — computed dynamically, not hard-coded
Workflow Steps
Step 3.5 (Governance) makes "7 steps" and "8 steps" both defensible, so always say "multi-step workflow" — never count steps.
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 Changed · -4 lines · -80 tokens per session 69f290416a93
- 1mo ago Changed · -11 tokens per session 7657f64ea22f
- 1mo ago First seen · 47 lines · 487 tokens per session scan A 66d494458f71
apex-accelerator no-hardcoded-counts.instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator (50 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 396 tokens to every session, about $0.0016 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.
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