autolith AGENTS.md

Repository-specific instructions for Autolith, a small Common Lisp agent that can modify itself while running. They describe the project's sources of truth, design rules, and package policies.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them when developing, reviewing, or changing the Autolith repository.
Why use it?
They prevent changes that conflict with the project's runtime model, recovery needs, or boundaries around self-modification.

Instructions file for CodexOpenCode

Install

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add instructions/lambda-symbolics/autolith/agents-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/lambda-symbolics/autolith

Made for: Codex, OpenCode.

Per session 2,817 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 2,817 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.02817 $0.02817
Opus 5 $0.01409 $0.01409
Sonnet 5 $0.00563 $0.00563
Haiku 4.5 $0.00282 $0.00282

Measured yesterday against content hash 1355d5a2fcec, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

autolith 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 yesterday.

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.

AGENTS.md · 299 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 299 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Repository Guidelines

Purpose and Sources of Truth

Autolith is a small, live, self-modifying Common Lisp agent. This file contains its enduring architectural and repository policy. docs/guide.org documents user-visible behavior, docs/architecture.org maps runtime and source boundaries, and tracked source plus behavioral tests are executable truth. Do not create another omnibus product specification.

Core principles:

  • Treat the live Lisp image as the primary runtime while keeping source sufficient for a clean rebuild.
  • Prefer Common Lisp and focused CLOS protocols over generated scripts, parallel type dispatch, duplicated data structures, or overlapping public interfaces.
  • Keep self-modification explicit, auditable, reconstructible, and confined to a small operation set.
  • Preserve durable conversations, user state, working generations, and a pristine recovery path.
  • Use process boundaries for reliability and accidental-damage containment, never as a hostile-code security claim.
  • Keep platform-specific behavior behind narrow adapters.
  • Treat migrations and compatibility readers as temporary release machinery. Give them an explicit removal boundary instead of accumulating them forever.

Do not leave TODOs, FIXMEs, stubs, placeholders, or knowingly partial implementations. If a requirement is genuinely too broad or conflicts with another requirement, stop and ask.

Supported source-development targets are Linux x86-64 and macOS arm64 on SBCL with a terminal interface, one primary agent, and no claim of hostile-code sandboxing. Nix builds support Linux x86-64 and macOS arm64. Packaged binary releases support Linux x86-64 and aarch64 with glibc or musl, macOS x86-64 and arm64, FreeBSD x86-64, NetBSD x86-64, and OpenBSD x86-64.

Upstream References

When a change depends on established behavior in another agent, inspect a current upstream checkout outside this Git worktree. Keep reference checkouts read-only, record the repository URL and exact inspected commit in the review notes, and refresh the checkout before making claims about current behavior. References are research inputs, not Autolith dependencies; do not edit them or copy their architecture wholesale.

Read the full file on GitHub · 299 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.

  1. yesterday First seen · 299 lines · 2,817 tokens per session scan A 1355d5a2fcec

Subscribe to this mod's changes

autolith AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository lambda-symbolics/autolith (261 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed ISC. It adds 2,817 tokens to every session, about $0.0141 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.