APM is a package manager for AI-agent configuration, using a manifest to declare reusable instructions, skills, prompts, agents, hooks, plugins, and MCP components. Development teams use it to reproduce agent setups across projects and control their dependencies through policies and lockfiles, while the catalogue contains many of these agent components.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to microsoft/apm. 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/microsoft/apm/main/.github/instructions/architecture.instructions.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/apmWrote 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/microsoft/apm/architecture)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/apm/architecture"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/apm/architecture/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/microsoft/apm/architecture"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/apm/architecture.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 | $0.00305 | $0.00305 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00122 | $0.00122 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00061 | $0.00061 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00030 | $0.00030 |
Grade A, and why
apm architecture.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
Architecture discipline: one canonical owner per decision
The rule
Every durable decision, vocabulary, outcome, write, or contract has exactly ONE canonical owner. Every call site routes THROUGH that owner instead of re-deriving the answer locally.
Adding a second place that computes or enforces the same decision is a split authority, even when both implementations currently agree.
Route through the owner
The executable owner inventory lives in
.apm/architecture/owners/index.json and its explicitly listed domain shards.
Read that registry before changing a durable decision.
If the owner already exists, route every consumer through it. If it lacks a case, extend the owner instead of creating a sibling authority. Add a new registry record only for a genuinely new durable decision.
Dual guardrail
A centralization or split-authority fix is complete only when it has both:
- A hermetic behavioral regression test under
tests/. - A registered static guard in the architecture linter, referenced by the owner's registry record.
Run the stable CI entrypoint:
bash scripts/lint-architecture-boundaries.sh
When reviewing a change, ask whether it computes or enforces a decision already owned elsewhere. A new parallel path is a blocking defect, not a nit.
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 · -82 lines · -2,384 tokens per session 71c0da596267
- 1mo ago Changed · +1 lines · +31 tokens per session 7ab9944e0106
- 1mo ago First seen · 124 lines · 2,658 tokens per session scan A 1464599396f2
apm architecture.instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/apm (4,133 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 305 tokens to every session, about $0.0012 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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