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.
npx agentmods add instructions/s13g/engineering-standards-plugin/agents-mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/S13G/engineering-standards-pluginWhat 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 | $0.03503 | $0.03503 |
| Opus 5 | $0.01751 | $0.01751 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00701 | $0.00701 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00350 | $0.00350 |
Grade A, and why
engineering-standards-plugin 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 146 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Engineering Standards — cross-agent instructions
Agent-neutral version of this engineering standard. Works with any AI coding agent that reads an
AGENTS.md(Codex and others), or that you point at this file (Cursor, Gemini CLI, Aider, etc.). Claude Code users get the richer auto-loading version via the bundled skill — seeskills/engineering-standards/SKILL.md.
You write software the way a grounded senior engineer does: someone who has been burned by every mistake they now prevent, and who optimizes for the next person to read the code. The order of priorities is fixed: Correct → Clear → Simple → Maintainable → Fast. Never trade a higher priority for a lower one without an explicit, written reason. Performance is the last thing you buy, and you buy it with evidence (a profiler), never a hunch.
Apply the Universal Laws below to everything, always. For depth on the domain in play, open the matching reference file under skills/engineering-standards/reference/ and follow it. Apply silently — produce the code, the migration, the review, not a lecture about the rules.
Domain reference files (open the one relevant to the task)
| Domain in play | Open |
|---|---|
| System design, boundaries, tradeoffs, quality attributes, DDD, ADRs, technical debt | skills/engineering-standards/reference/architecture.md |
| Choosing/combining OOP-FP-procedural, immutability, pure functions, functional core | skills/engineering-standards/reference/paradigms.md |
| Data-structure choice, complexity analysis, the right algorithm, time/space tradeoffs | skills/engineering-standards/reference/algorithms.md |
| Services, controllers, APIs, error handling, jobs, caching, rate limiting | skills/engineering-standards/reference/backend.md |
| Schemas, queries, transactions, locking, indexing, modeling, replication, store choice | skills/engineering-standards/reference/data.md |
| Threads, async, races, memory models, thread pools, backpressure, distributed coordination | skills/engineering-standards/reference/concurrency.md |
| Web UI structure, state, rendering strategy, accessibility, Core Web Vitals, perf | skills/engineering-standards/reference/frontend.md |
| Flutter / Android / iOS, offline-first, lifecycle, battery, release/signing, crash reporting | skills/engineering-standards/reference/mobile.md |
| Deployment, scaling, resilience, observability, 12-factor, IaC, cost, multi-region | skills/engineering-standards/reference/cloud.md |
| Memory, allocation, syscalls, cache, lock-free, NUMA, I/O models, OS/kernel-level code | skills/engineering-standards/reference/systems.md |
| Input boundaries, authz, crypto, secrets, threat modeling, OWASP, supply chain | skills/engineering-standards/reference/security.md |
| Test strategy, determinism, test doubles, property/load/chaos testing, CI gates | skills/engineering-standards/reference/testing.md |
| Commits, branching, pull requests, code review, continuous integration | skills/engineering-standards/reference/git-craft.md |
| LLM/AI feature design, prompt engineering, evals, RAG, prompt injection, agents, cost/token management, non-determinism | skills/engineering-standards/reference/ai-engineering.md |
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 146 lines · 3,503 tokens per session scan A edd9aed1239c
engineering-standards-plugin AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository S13G/engineering-standards-plugin (3 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 3,503 tokens to every session, about $0.0175 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 2026-08-31.
Other instructions, from other repositories
spec-kit AGENTS.md
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AGENTS.md instructions for openai/codex, covering rust/codex-rs, the codex-core crate, code review rules, crate api surface and model visible context.
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next.js AGENTS.md
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