paranoia AGENTS.md

Repository instructions for Paranoia, a security review system that evaluates plans and evidence under defined operating conditions. They explain how to set realistic risks, boundaries, and review expectations.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them when planning or reviewing changes in Paranoia. They help define trusted and untrusted inputs, assess consequences, and choose an appropriate review scope.
Why use it?
They prevent reviews from using vague assumptions about attackers or production systems. This helps agents judge security findings consistently and avoid blocking work without sufficient evidence.

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

Made for: Codex, OpenCode.

Per session 8,635 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 8,635 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 $0.08635 $0.08635
Opus 5 $0.04318 $0.04318
Sonnet 5 $0.01727 $0.01727
Haiku 4.5 $0.00864 $0.00864

Measured 2d ago against content hash f89ba4a6aa63, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

paranoia 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 · 548 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 548 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Repository agent instructions

These instructions govern work in paranoia-local. User instructions take precedence but do not silently expand scope.

Freeze proportionate stakes

Before any convergence loop, state one concrete, stable operating model: deployment, operators, trusted actors, untrusted inputs, active adversary capabilities, concurrency, network boundary, expected files/claims/rounds/latency, consequences of false clear versus false block, and explicit exclusions. Avoid vague labels such as “production”, “malicious repository”, or “high stakes”. Distinguish untrusted static bytes from repository-selected code execution, a hostile local process racing paths, a compromised OS, and hostile web content. A material stakes change requires user direction and retriage; never strengthen stakes merely to keep a review loop generating work.

Default local-tool calibration unless the task says otherwise: trusted single user and OS; plan/repository/fetched content untrusted as data; no hostile local race; ordinary edits must block/retry; tens to low hundreds of claims; evidence useful within minutes; false NOT-BLOCKED, authority errors, and wrong evidence binding high impact; recoverable blocking acceptable. Formal proof, multi-tenancy, hostile same-user races, and deliberately corrupted state recovery are not implied.

Review the right artifact

Do a plan review to validate the design, then implement it. Once implementation begins, paranoia convergence reviews the code branch/diff, not the old plan, unless the user explicitly asks to reopen plan design. Never spend repeated rounds polishing a plan while reporting implementation progress. Label every run in commentary as PLAN or CODE. After implementation begins, do not invoke critique_plan again merely as acceptance for plan-role mechanics unless the user explicitly authorizes that return. Use deterministic production-handler lifecycle coverage and keep convergence on the code artifact.

Before review, update public documentation and these agent instructions. Before opening a PR, run the primary capability end to end; fake-backed tests alone do not establish usability.

Read the full file on GitHub · 548 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 · 548 lines · 8,635 tokens per session scan A f89ba4a6aa63

Subscribe to this mod's changes

paranoia AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository subvertnormality/paranoia (13 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 8,635 tokens to every session, about $0.0432 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.

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