sq is a command-line data-wrangling tool that lets users query, join, inspect, compare, and transform SQL databases and structured files such as CSV and Excel using SQL or jq-like queries. It is intended for people working with databases and tabular or document data. Catalogue add-ons provide workflows for using sq from coding agents.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to neilotoole/sq. 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/neilotoole/sq/master/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/neilotoole/sqWrote 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/neilotoole/sq/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/neilotoole/sq/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/neilotoole/sq/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/neilotoole/sq/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/neilotoole/sq/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 | $0.04477 | $0.04477 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.01791 | $0.01791 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00895 | $0.00895 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00448 | $0.00448 |
Grade A, and why
sq 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 7d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 406 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
AGENTS.md
Guidance for AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, Codex, etc.) and human contributors working in this repo.
Subdirectories add their own conventions on top of these rules:
cli/AGENTS.md: CLI command conventionssite/AGENTS.md: sq.io website (Hugo/Bun) conventions
[!IMPORTANT] Before making a significant change, review
docs/README.mdand the contributor docs it links to (architecture, drivers, grammar, development, CI, Sakila, releasing). Read the ones relevant to your task before you start, and if your change makes any of them inaccurate, update them in the same change.
About sq
sq is a command-line data wrangler providing jq-style access to structured
data sources (eight SQL databases: SQLite, rqlite, DuckDB, Postgres, SQL
Server, MySQL, ClickHouse and Oracle; and document formats like CSV, JSON and
Excel). User
docs live at
sq.io.
Key documents
Before making non-trivial changes, read the document most relevant to your task:
README.md: project overview and user-facing intro.CONTRIBUTING.md: full contributor guide (tooling,Makefileusage, driver implementation patterns, test handles,CHANGELOG.mdformat).docs/README.md: index of the contributor docs underdocs/.docs/ARCHITECTURE.md: Mermaid ERD of core types (Source,Driver,Grip,Registry,RecordWriter, etc.).docs/DRIVERS.md: driver development guide (package structure, type mapping, the driver ship checklist).docs/GRAMMAR.md: SLQ query language grammar guide (companion togrammar/SLQ.g4).docs/DEVELOPER.md: the local development loop (Makefiletargets, inner loop, git hooks).docs/CI.md: how CI works (what runs on a PR, nightly, and on a release tag; the DB integration matrix; the release path).docs/SAKILA.md: the Sakila test dataset (sakiladbimages, embedded vs external sources, engine matrix, repo-wide usage).- sq.io: end-user documentation for commands and query syntax.
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.
- 7d ago Changed · +2 lines · +27 tokens per session 5a0afc6f1ff2
- 1mo ago Changed · +5 lines · +100 tokens per session 536fb49e63b6
- 1mo ago Changed · +35 lines · +430 tokens per session 563c7f656a09
- 1mo ago Changed · +3 lines · +39 tokens per session 00bb96d460f5
- 1mo ago Changed · +2 lines · +44 tokens per session 2006328cbda8
- 2mo ago First seen · 359 lines · 3,837 tokens per session scan A 513d05efdfea
sq AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository neilotoole/sq (2,574 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 4,477 tokens to every session, about $0.0179 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.
Other instructions, from other repositories
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).
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.
vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.md
Instructions for microsoft/vscode, covering vs code oss third-party-notices pipeline, architecture, pipeline flow in ci, cache eligibility and rollout and applying the notice (cutover).
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 copilot-instructions.md
Copilot instructions for microsoft/vscode, covering vs code copilot instructions, project overview, root folders, core architecture (src/ folder) and built-in extensions (extensions/ folder).
deepseek-harness AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md instructions for deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness, covering agents.md, pre-stable apis and released session data, repository layout, commands and host sandbox failures.