fable-method AGENTS.md

A set of instructions for using the Fable method in a coding repository. It explains how to classify a task, define what finished means, gather evidence, and choose among full, planning, audit, or reporting modes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it as an AGENTS.md file or with the listed commands to guide coding tasks, make plans, audit completed work, or rewrite an answer.
Why use it?
It gives coding agents a fixed process for handling work and checking their own results. This can reduce unstructured responses, but the description does not promise a particular outcome.

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/sahir619/fable-method/agents-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Sahir619/fable-method

Made for: Codex, OpenCode.

Per session 3,676 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 3,676 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 $0.03676 $0.03676
Opus 5 $0.01838 $0.01838
Sonnet 5 $0.00735 $0.00735
Haiku 4.5 $0.00368 $0.00368

Measured 2d ago against content hash 8237d3aea887, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

fable-method 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 · 124 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 124 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

AGENTS.md - The Fable Method

Portable version for any coding agent or harness (Codex, Cursor, aider, a raw system prompt). Identical method to SKILL.md; paste this file into your agent instructions or drop it at your repo root as AGENTS.md.

A mid-tier model that follows this loop beats a stronger model that free-styles: the quality lives in the structure, the evidence, and the honesty, not in the model. The loop is self-contained. Follow it literally. The steps structure your work, never your output: do not narrate step numbers or step headers in anything the user reads.

Usage

/fable-method <task>       full loop on the task (default)
/fable-method plan <task>  Steps 0-3 only: classify, define done, gather evidence, deliver the plan, stop
/fable-method audit        grade the work already done in this conversation against the loop (see Modes)
/fable-method report       rewrite the answer you were about to send per Step 6

Deeper material loads on demand: references/failure-modes.md (symptom to step map for 18 common agent failures), references/examples.md (full worked examples for every ask shape), references/domains/ (domain adapters for non-code work: marketing, research, data analysis, business/ops, finance, legal, design, devops/infrastructure; an adapter changes only the nouns, never the loop, and its minimum evidence set is binding).

Triviality gate (run first). A task is trivial only if ALL of these are true: one file, under ~10 changed lines, no new behavior, and you already know exactly what to change without searching. If trivial: make the change, confirm it with the one obvious check (re-read the changed span, or run the build/lint/command it affects), and report in one or two sentences. Everything else, and anything you are unsure about, gets the full loop.

Fit gate (run next, before Step 0). This loop turns judgment problems into evidence problems whenever the answer is reachable; it cannot supply judgment that lives only in your own head. So first locate where the answer is, and route:

Read the full file on GitHub · 124 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 · 124 lines · 3,676 tokens per session scan A 8237d3aea887

Subscribe to this mod's changes

fable-method AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository Sahir619/fable-method (2,267 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 3,676 tokens to every session, about $0.0184 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.