Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx agentmods add instructions/jswest/bartleby/claude-mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jswest/bartlebyWrote 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/jswest/bartleby/claude-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/jswest/bartleby/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/jswest/bartleby/claude-md.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" 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 | $0.01009 | $0.01009 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00504 | $0.00504 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00202 | $0.00202 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00101 | $0.00101 |
Grade A, and why
bartleby CLAUDE.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 4d 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 — 61 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
CLAUDE.md
Instructions for Claude working in this repo. Terse on purpose. Two companions:
ARCHITECTURE.md— load-bearing invariants and current state. Read it before changing anything structural. The decision log (the why behind past calls) now lives one-per-file underdocs/decisions/.CONTRIBUTING.md— the human narrative of the workflow below.
Bartleby ingests documents into per-project SQLite (FTS5 + sqlite-vec), then a
skill scripts an agent over that DB. Two surfaces, one DB: the bartleby CLI
(ingestion + helpers) and the skill scripts in bartleby/skill_scripts/.
Working agreements
- No backwards compatibility, by default. Delete old code — no compat shims, no
feature-flagged old paths, nothing left dormant. The one sanctioned exception:
additive-only schema upgrades (new tables, indexes, nullable columns) get a
_upgrade_vN_to_vN+1entry inbartleby/db/upgrades.pyso existing corpora runbartleby project upgrade <name>instead of re-ingesting. - Schema bumps mean re-ingest. A non-additive schema change bumps
SCHEMA_VERSIONinbartleby/db/schema.pyand tells users to re-ingest. There is no automatic migration for those; don't write one. A bump that's additive in DDL but needs data populated at ingest is effectively non-additive — re-ingest-only. - Polymorphic chunks discipline. All writes to the
chunkstable go through the typed helpers inbartleby.db.chunks. NeverINSERTintochunksdirectly — theCHECK (source_kind IN ...)constraint and the typed helpers are both load-bearing. - Memory enforcement is at script level, not prompt level. If a session has
memory_enabled=0,searchexcludes prior-session findings regardless of flags or prompting. Don't soften this. - Skill scripts speak JSON. Print results as JSON to stdout; exit non-zero on
error with
{"error": ..., "code": ...}. Prose and progress go to stderr only. - When unsure, stop and ask. Most choices here have a prior conversation behind them. If something is ambiguous or uncovered, ask rather than wing it.
- Smallest fix that fits. Prefer the simplest change that satisfies the requirement; don't add abstractions, flags, or migrations unless asked.
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.
- 4d ago First seen · 61 lines · 1,009 tokens per session scan A cbd82e8fc70b
bartleby CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository jswest/bartleby (11 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 1,009 tokens to every session, about $0.0050 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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