ai-agents: Instructions file for Claude Code

.github/instructions/tool-use-hook-bar.instructions.md

ai-agents tool-use-hook-bar.instructions.md is an instructions file for Claude Code, GitHub Copilot from rjmurillo/ai-agents. It costs 2,431 tokens per session, scanned A, original, MIT.

Design rules for hooks that run around individual tool calls, including their scope and cost on the agent's active execution path.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them when adding, reviewing, or restoring pre-call, post-call, permission, or failure hooks.
Why use it?
They prevent expensive or overly broad hooks from affecting every tool call, especially failed calls that cannot be narrowed to one tool.

Instructions file for Claude CodeGitHub Copilot

Written for Claude Code and GitHub Copilot: PreToolUse hook event, but also a Copilot instructions file. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents.

This is rjmurillo/ai-agents's own configuration. It tells Claude Code and GitHub Copilot how to work on ai-agents itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything ai-agents configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to rjmurillo/ai-agents. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rjmurillo/ai-agents/main/.github/instructions/tool-use-hook-bar.instructions.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rjmurillo/ai-agents

Made for: Claude Code, GitHub Copilot.

Wrote 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.

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README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/rjmurillo/ai-agents/tool-use-hook-bar.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/rjmurillo/ai-agents/tool-use-hook-bar)
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<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/rjmurillo/ai-agents/tool-use-hook-bar"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/rjmurillo/ai-agents/tool-use-hook-bar.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 2,431 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 2,431 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.02431 $0.02431
Opus 5 $0.01215 $0.01215
Sonnet 5 $0.00486 $0.00486
Haiku 4.5 $0.00243 $0.00243

Measured 2d ago against content hash 3b951b2e0680, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ai-agents tool-use-hook-bar.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 2d 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.

.github/instructions/tool-use-hook-bar.instructions.md · 180 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 180 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

The Tool-Use Hook Bar

Operative rule for ADR-084 rule 6. The ADR carries the decision and its evidence; this file is what to do at the authoring seam.

Scope: every per-call event, vendored or repo-local. That is PreToolUse, PostToolUse, PermissionRequest, and PostToolUseFailure, matching ADR-084 rule 6. Naming fewer would leave the bar evadable by event choice: a guard refused on PostToolUse could re-register on PostToolUseFailure, pay the same spawn, and match every tool.

PostToolUseFailure deserves the most scrutiny, not the least. build/scripts/generate_dispatcher.py:517 omits it from _MATCHER_EVENTS, so it cannot be tool-scoped at all: any registration on it fires on every failed tool call. It is the one per-call event with no narrowing available. Nothing is registered on it today (ADR-097), so this is a warning about what re-adding one would cost, not a description of a live hook.

A tool-use hook runs on the caller's hot path on every matching call, for the life of the install. Its cost scales with how hard the agent is working, which the session-boundary events do not.

The cost is a blast radius, not a stopwatch

Lead with this, because the millisecond framing understates the risk by orders of magnitude.

Issue #5013, recorded at .agents/architecture/ADR-085-...asymmetry.md:428-431: the push_pr_script_identity_guard was registered on a bare Bash matcher, and combined with the Copilot dispatcher's timed child-process deny (#4706) it denied 127 unrelated Bash commands over more than 21 minutes before the owner contained it. That is the real failure mode: a wrong deny on a hot tool takes out unrelated work. Per-spawn latency is the smaller half.

Three mechanisms make a tool-use matcher wider than it looks. None is visible from .claude/, which is where hooks are authored.

1. Copilot matches on tool name only. Its matcher targets are toolName for preToolUse and postToolUse (see .claude/skills/agent-harness-reference/references/official-hook-contracts.md, "Matchers"). There is no argument-scoped form. Claude accepts Bash(git push*); build/scripts/generate_dispatcher.py strips the argument constraint via _COMMAND_SCOPED_RE, so it degrades to bare Bash and the interpreter starts on every Bash call, filtering in-process after the spawn.

Read the full file on GitHub · 180 lines

Changes

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.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 180 lines · 2,431 tokens per session scan A 3b951b2e0680

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ai-agents tool-use-hook-bar.instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository rjmurillo/ai-agents (45 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 2,431 tokens to every session, about $0.0122 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 2026-09-03.

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