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/tests.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/tests)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/apm/tests"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/apm/tests/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/tests"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/apm/tests.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 | $0.03329 | $0.03329 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.01332 | $0.01332 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00666 | $0.00666 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00333 | $0.00333 |
Grade A, and why
apm tests.instructions.md scanned grade A with 1 finding 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.
Makes network callslowCapability
Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.
description: "Test conventions: URL assertions must use urllib.parse, never substring." How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 331 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Test Conventions
URL assertions: use urllib.parse, never substring
Any assertion that a URL appears in or matches some output must parse the
URL with urllib.parse.urlparse and compare on a parsed component
(hostname, port, scheme, path). Substring assertions like
assert "host.example.com" in msg or assert "https://x" in url are flagged
by CodeQL as py/incomplete-url-substring-sanitization (high severity, "the
string may be at an arbitrary position in the URL") and will fail CI.
This rule applies regardless of whether the value being asserted looks like a
"safe" hostname — CodeQL is a static check and cannot infer that host in
assert host in msg is bounded; the alert fires anyway.
Wrong
# Substring match -- CodeQL py/incomplete-url-substring-sanitization
assert "registry.example.com" in msg
assert "https://api.github.com/v0/servers" in url
assert "127.0.0.1" in warning_text
# Set membership of substring -- still flagged (CodeQL can't infer set type)
hosts = {urlparse(tok).hostname for tok in msg.split() if "://" in tok}
assert "poisoned.example.com" in hosts
Right
from urllib.parse import urlparse
# Direct hostname equality on a parsed URL token
urls = [tok for tok in msg.split() if "://" in tok]
assert len(urls) == 1
assert urlparse(urls[0]).hostname == "registry.example.com"
# Set equality (not membership) when multiple URLs are expected
hosts = {urlparse(tok.strip("()")).hostname for tok in msg.split() if "://" in tok}
assert hosts == {"a.example.com", "b.example.com"}
# Component-level checks for path / scheme / port
parsed = urlparse(url)
assert parsed.scheme == "https"
assert parsed.hostname == "api.github.com"
assert parsed.path == "/v0/servers"
Helper pattern for multi-URL output
When asserting against logger / CLI output that may contain multiple URLs, extract them with a small helper and assert on the parsed tuple:
def _printed_urls(text: str) -> list[tuple[str, str, str]]:
"""Extract (scheme, hostname, path) tuples from any URLs in text."""
from urllib.parse import urlparse
out = []
for token in text.split():
cleaned = token.strip("(),.;'\"")
if "://" not in cleaned:
continue
p = urlparse(cleaned)
out.append((p.scheme, p.hostname or "", p.path))
return out
assert ("https", "registry.example.com", "/v0/servers") in _printed_urls(msg)
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 · 331 lines · 3,329 tokens per session scan A 555f792adf02
apm tests.instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/apm (4,133 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 3,329 tokens to every session, about $0.0133 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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