ase AGENTS.md

Project instructions for ASE, or Agentic Software Engineering, a set of plugins, command-line tools, and background services for AI-assisted software development.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them when working on ASE plugins, skills, sub-agents, command-line features, or its project service.
Why use it?
They explain the repository layout, supported coding-agent tools, and how its skills and helper agents are organized.

Instructions file for CodexOpenCode

View the source file rse/ase
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add instructions/rse/ase/agents-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rse/ase

Made for: Codex, OpenCode.

Per session 1,723 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 1,723 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 $0.01723 $0.01723
Opus 5 $0.00861 $0.00861
Sonnet 5 $0.00345 $0.00345
Haiku 4.5 $0.00172 $0.00172

Measured 2d ago against content hash 4cead2abfb00, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ase 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 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.

AGENTS.md · 141 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 141 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

About

Agentic Software Engineering (ASE) is the opinionated companion tooling of Dr. Ralf S. Engelschall for combining Agentic AI Coding with Software Engineering in tools like Anthropic Claude Code CLI. ASE consists of an agent tool plugin (hooks, skills, sub-agents, meta files), a Command-Line Interface (CLI) tool, and a per-project background service bridged into the agent tool as a Model-Context-Protocol (MCP) server.

The primary target agent tool is Anthropic Claude Code CLI; GitHub Copilot CLI and OpenAI Codex CLI are secondary targets, selected via ASE_TOOL=copilot resp. ASE_TOOL=codex or the --tool CLI option.

Repository Layout

ASE (Agentic Software Engineering) ships three deliverables from one repo:

  • plugin/: the agent tool plugin
    • plugin/skills/ase-xxx-xxx/: the 50 skills, each with a SKILL.md (agent instructions) and a help.md (Unix-style manual page)
    • plugin/agents/: the sub-agent definitions leveraged by the skills
    • plugin/meta/: the shared meta files (constitution, tenets, persona, dialog, getopt, and artifact format conventions), exposed to skills via ase meta <name>; the specification format ase-format-spec.md includes the SpecBook models and formats description ase-format-specbook.md and the standard SpecBook schema configuration ase-format-specbook.yaml, both generated at build-time by SpecBook (@rse/specbook)
    • plugin/hooks/: the per-agent-tool hook wiring (hooks.json, hooks-copilot.json, hooks-codex.json)
    • plugin/.claude-plugin/, plugin/.codex-plugin/, plugin/.github/plugin/: the per-agent-tool plugin manifests
  • tool/: the @rse/ase CLI
    • tool/src/ase.ts: the entry point, wiring all top-level commands
    • tool/src/ase-*.ts: one module per top-level command (setup, config, mcp, service, hook, statusline, task, artifact, spec, meta, compat, diagram, worktree, mint) plus support modules (log, stdio, getopt, kv, markdown, skills, sleep, timestamp, version)
    • tool/bin/ase: the published shim, loading compiled output from dst/
    • tool/plugin/ and tool/.claude-plugin/: build-time copies of plugin/ and .claude-plugin/ -- never edit them, they are regenerated
  • pages/: the GitHub Pages site (https://ase.tools), an Astro project
    • pages/src/data/*.ts: the content data, especially skills.ts (the single source of truth for skill grouping and ordering), highlights.ts, methods.ts, comparison.ts, fit.ts, testimonials.ts, and site.ts
    • pages/src/components/*.astro: the page sections and UI components, assembled in pages/src/pages/index.astro

Read the full file on GitHub · 141 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 · 141 lines · 1,723 tokens per session scan A 4cead2abfb00

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ase AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository rse/ase (47 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 1,723 tokens to every session, about $0.0086 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 2026-08-30.