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/encoding.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/encoding)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/apm/encoding"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/apm/encoding/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/encoding"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/apm/encoding.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 | $0.00369 | $0.00369 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00148 | $0.00148 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00074 | $0.00074 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00037 | $0.00037 |
Grade A, and why
apm encoding.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
Encoding Rules
Constraint
All source code files and CLI output strings must stay within printable ASCII (U+0020–U+007E).
Do NOT use:
- Emojis (e.g.
🚀,✨,❌) - Unicode box-drawing characters (e.g.
─,│,┌) - Em dashes (
—), en dashes (–), curly quotes (",",',') - Any character outside the ASCII range (codepoint > U+007E)
Why: Windows cp1252 terminals raise UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character for any character outside cp1252. Keeping output within ASCII guarantees identical behaviour on every platform without dual-path fallback logic.
Status symbol convention
Use ASCII bracket notation consistently across all CLI output, help text, and log messages:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
[+] |
success / confirmed |
[!] |
warning |
[x] |
error |
[i] |
info |
[*] |
action / processing |
[>] |
running / progress |
These map directly to the STATUS_SYMBOLS dict in src/apm_cli/utils/console.py.
Scope
This rule applies to:
- Python source files (
*.py) - CLI help strings and command output
- Markdown documentation and instruction files under
.github/ - Shell scripts and CI workflow files
Exception: binary assets and third-party vendored files are excluded.
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 First seen · 44 lines · 369 tokens per session scan A 93db7377dc89
apm encoding.instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/apm (4,133 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 369 tokens to every session, about $0.0015 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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