Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills. 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/mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mhenke/john-ousterhout-skillsWrote 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/mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills/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/mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills/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 | $0.00517 | $0.00517 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00259 | $0.00259 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00103 | $0.00103 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00052 | $0.00052 |
Grade A, and why
john-ousterhout-skills 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 12d 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
AGENTS.md
What this repo is
A collection of APOSD skills installed via npx skills add mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills. No build, test, lint, or typecheck system — all content is Markdown.
Skills (under skills/)
| Skill | Path |
|---|---|
| aposd (always-on behavioral rules) | skills/aposd/SKILL.md |
| aposd-critique (design review) | skills/aposd-critique/SKILL.md |
| aposd-audit (design audit) | skills/aposd-audit/SKILL.md |
| create-release-workflow | skills/create-release-workflow/SKILL.md |
Editing rules
- CLAUDE.md is the source of truth for the 15 behavioral rules. Edit it first.
- Mirror changes to
.cursor/rules/aposd-guidelines.mdc(body identical to CLAUDE.md). - Condense changes into
skills/aposd/SKILL.md(context-aware condensed version). - Update
CHANGELOG.mdfor the next release.
Path resolution
Bash commands in SKILL.md files use <SKILL_DIR> (resolved at runtime from the skill's location in the system prompt). Do not use bare relative paths like scripts/critique-storage.mjs — they fail when the skill is installed globally.
Tracked source vs local copy
- Tracked:
skills/— commit changes here. - Gitignored:
.agents/skills/— local install copy.npx skills addpopulates it fromskills/.
Reference files
Shared docs live in skills/<name>/references/. Root-level reference/ is canonical; vendored copies are in skill directories for reliable symlink resolution.
Release process
Follow skills/create-release-workflow/SKILL.md:
- Draft CHANGELOG entry
git tag -a v{NEW_VERSION} && git push origin v{NEW_VERSION}gh release create(extract body from CHANGELOG)- Update README install examples to new tag
- Commit and push
Repo conventions
- Markdown lint: no trailing whitespace, consistent heading hierarchy.
- ADRs in
docs/adr/— lowercase, hyphenated names. - No SemVer guarantee until v1.0.0.
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.
- 12d ago First seen · 50 lines · 517 tokens per session scan A 86910a6060b7
john-ousterhout-skills AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository mhenke/john-ousterhout-skills (6 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 517 tokens to every session, about $0.0026 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 2026-08-31.
Other instructions, from other repositories
spec-kit AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md instructions for github/spec-kit, covering agents.md, about spec kit and specify, quickstart — add a new integration in 5 steps, integration architecture and integrationmanifest — file tracking.
next.js AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md instructions for vercel/next.js, covering next.js development guide, codebase structure, monorepo overview, core package: packages/next and other important packages.
codex AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md instructions for openai/codex, covering rust/codex-rs, the codex-core crate, code review rules, crate api surface and model visible context.
vscode buildNext.instructions.md
Working notes and architecture documentation for the new esbuild-based build system in build/next. Use when making changes to the new build pipeline (transpile/bundle commands, NLS plugin, source-map handling, resource copying, or self-hosting watch tasks).
langchain AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md instructions for langchain-ai/langchain, covering global development guidelines for the langchain monorepo, corridor security analysis, project architecture and context, monorepo structure and development tools & commands.
vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.md
Instructions for microsoft/vscode, covering vs code oss third-party-notices pipeline, architecture, pipeline flow in ci, applying the notice (cutover) and fallback chain (never fail the build).