Bernstein is an open-source governance layer for AI agents that applies written policies, schedules agent work deterministically, controls approvals, and records verifiable execution history. It is used to coordinate CLI coding agents and other agent workloads, including parallel runs and offline review, while the catalogue entries provide its agent workflows and controls.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to sipyourdrink-ltd/bernstein. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sipyourdrink-ltd/bernstein/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sipyourdrink-ltd/bernsteinWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/sipyourdrink-ltd/bernstein/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/sipyourdrink-ltd/bernstein/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/sipyourdrink-ltd/bernstein/agents-md/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/sipyourdrink-ltd/bernstein/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/sipyourdrink-ltd/bernstein/agents-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.01251 | $0.01251 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00500 | $0.00500 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00250 | $0.00250 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00125 | $0.00125 |
Grade A, and why
bernstein 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 22d 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.
Copies of this mod
1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:
- bernstein CLAUDE.md — 98% identical, 4 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 107 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
bernstein - AGENTS.md
Overview
Bernstein is the open-source governance layer for AI agents. It runs on policy as code: you write the policy - who may do what, what needs approval, what must be recorded - and Bernstein enforces it and produces the verifiable record. A deterministic scheduler - no model in the coordination loop - runs agents in parallel, gates what they produce, and records every step, so a run can be verified after the fact, offline, from the artifacts alone. CLI coding agents work out of the box (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, and 50+ more), and the same layer governs any agent workload: the deliverable can be a diff, a research report, a dataset, or an audit evidence pack. Air-gap install profile included. Apache-2.0.
Module map
Full per-file map: docs/sdd/module-map.md (generated).
| Package | Purpose / detail |
|---|---|
core/ |
orchestration engine - src/bernstein/core/ |
adapters/ |
CLI agent adapters - src/bernstein/adapters/AGENTS.md |
agents/ |
agent catalog & discovery - src/bernstein/agents/ |
cli/ |
Click CLI - src/bernstein/cli/AGENTS.md |
evolution/ |
self-evolution engine - src/bernstein/evolution/ |
eval/ |
evaluation harness - src/bernstein/eval/ |
plugins/ |
plugin system (pluggy) - src/bernstein/plugins/ |
tui/ |
Textual TUI - src/bernstein/tui/ |
github_app/ |
GitHub App integration - src/bernstein/github_app/ |
mcp/ |
MCP server - src/bernstein/mcp/ |
benchmark/ |
SWE-bench - src/bernstein/benchmark/ |
Directory context files
Per-directory context files for agents working inside a subtree. Each covers: what the directory is for, key files, invariants, and how to test that subtree.
| Path | Covers |
|---|---|
src/bernstein/adapters/AGENTS.md |
CLI agent adapters |
src/bernstein/cli/AGENTS.md |
Click CLI |
src/bernstein/core/lineage/AGENTS.md |
Lineage: artifact provenance |
src/bernstein/core/orchestration/AGENTS.md |
Orchestration engine |
src/bernstein/core/quality/AGENTS.md |
Quality gates and verification |
src/bernstein/core/security/AGENTS.md |
Security: audit chain, identity, policy |
tests/AGENTS.md |
Test suite |
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.
- 22d ago Changed · +1 tokens per session eef1399baf4f
- 24d ago Changed 8fc4ad4b0767
- 1mo ago Changed · -1 tokens per session 73bf05048634
- 1mo ago Changed · +1 lines · +120 tokens per session f352497ba4a2
- 1mo ago First seen · 106 lines · 1,131 tokens per session scan A 624b1a18d857
bernstein AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository sipyourdrink-ltd/bernstein (1,330 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 1,251 tokens to every session, about $0.0050 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.
Other instructions, from other repositories
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next.js AGENTS.md
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