ox AGENTS.md

A set of instructions for coding agents using SageOx, including guidance on when to work independently and when to involve a person.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to guide debugging, decision-making, pull requests, issue creation, and the loading of SageOx team context.
Why use it?
It helps agents avoid unnecessary interruptions and focus human attention on decisions that genuinely need review.

Instructions file for CodexOpenCode

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/sageox/ox/agents-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sageox/ox

Made for: Codex, OpenCode.

Per session 4,266 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 4,266 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 $0.04266 $0.04266
Opus 5 $0.02133 $0.02133
Sonnet 5 $0.00853 $0.00853
Haiku 4.5 $0.00427 $0.00427

Measured 2d ago against content hash a652f09d62f3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ox 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 · 300 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 300 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Run ox agent prime at session start to load SageOx team context — it's fine to read the user's request first.

Human attention is the scarcest resource

Human time is more expensive than compute. Before interrupting with a question, a PR for review, or a new issue, ask yourself: could I have resolved this without a human in the loop?

Default to independent resolution:

  • Can you debug the issue yourself by reading code, running tests, checking logs, or using tools? Do that.
  • Is the decision reversible? If yes, make the call and note the reasoning in a commit message. The human will tell you if they disagree.
  • Do you have enough context from CLAUDE.md, past sessions, or the codebase to decide? Decide.
  • Is this a genuinely novel tradeoff that sets precedent? That is worth interrupting for.

Prefer fewer, denser PRs over many small ones. A reviewer context-switching across four related PRs costs more than reviewing one larger coherent PR. Split only when the units of work are independent (different subsystems, different reviewers, different merge timing).

When you do ask:

  • State the specific decision you need and why automation can't make it.
  • Bundle related questions into one exchange rather than a stream of individual ones.
  • Propose a default so the response can be "yes" / "no" / "do something else specific" rather than open-ended.

What NOT to escalate:

  • Routine bugs where the fix is obvious from the test output.
  • Style/lint issues.
  • Choosing between two roughly-equivalent approaches when either would be fine.
  • Asking permission for reversible operations (new branches, test runs, log analysis).

The cheapest review is the one that never has to happen because the code was right the first time. The next cheapest is a single coherent PR that tells a complete story. Optimize for those.


What is ox?

ox is agentic context infrastructure for software teams. It makes architectural decisions, team knowledge, and session history automatically available to AI coworkers — so every coding session starts with the full picture, not from zero.

Read the full file on GitHub · 300 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 · 300 lines · 4,266 tokens per session scan A a652f09d62f3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ox AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository sageox/ox (50 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 4,266 tokens to every session, about $0.0213 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.