What is mcphawk AGENTS.md?

Repository instructions for MCPHawk, a developer tool that records and examines traffic between MCP clients and servers. MCP is a protocol that lets AI clients communicate with tools and data services.

Use them when changing MCPHawk's traffic capture, SQLite storage, protocol handling, web interface, MCP server, or tests.

They give coding agents project-specific rules for dependencies, tests, code style, database work, and protocol behavior. This reduces changes that conflict with the repository's layout or checks.

How tech4242/mcphawk configures Codex and OpenCode

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to tech4242/mcphawk. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tech4242/mcphawk/main/AGENTS.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tech4242/mcphawk

Made for: Codex, OpenCode.

Wrote 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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/tech4242/mcphawk/agents-md/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/tech4242/mcphawk/agents-md)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/tech4242/mcphawk/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/tech4242/mcphawk/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/tech4242/mcphawk/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/tech4242/mcphawk/agents-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 1,014 This file is loaded in full into every session.

When invoked 1,014 The same file — it is already loaded in full.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.01014	$0.01014
Opus 5.5	$0.00406	$0.00406
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00203	$0.00203
Haiku 4.5	$0.00101	$0.00101

Measured 1mo ago against content hash e764fbcb7a43, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

mcphawk 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 1mo 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 · 72 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 72 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

AGENTS.md

MCPHawk is DevTools for MCP: it records real traffic between MCP clients and servers (stdio wrapper, HTTP proxy, passive sniffer), stores it in SQLite, and serves a web UI plus its own MCP server over the same data. Targets MCP spec 2026-07-28 and still supports the older initialize handshake era.

Rules

Use the local venv (.venv/bin/python) and Makefile targets when they exist.
Add dependencies to requirements.txt / requirements-dev.txt and pyproject.toml; never pip install ad hoc.
Before finishing: make lint and make test. Coverage must stay above 85% (make coverage fails below it).
New tests: tests/unit/ for isolated functions, tests/integration/<area>/ for anything touching the DB, processes, network or HTTP. Build traffic with tests/traffic.py.
Follow the MCP spec and the official SDK instead of inventing custom protocol behaviour.
Write PEP 8 from the start (ruff, line length 88, Python 3.10+).

Layout

capture/  -> store/recorder.py -> SQLite -> query.py + analysis/ -> web/app.py, mcp_server.py

protocol/: JSON-RPC framing, MCP semantics for both eras, secret masking, token estimates
store/recorder.py: request/response pairing, multi round-trip chains, client/server identity
query.py: the one read layer; the web API and the MCP server must not query SQL themselves
runs.py: agent runs, computed at read time (client group, split at 5 min idle gaps). sessions.client_key stores only which client process a session belongs to
install/: client config locations and install/uninstall
otel/: OpenTelemetry export (semconv.py maps to the MCP semantic conventions, exporter.py streams OTLP from mcphawk up, prometheus.py serves /metrics)
frontend/: Vue 3 app, built into mcphawk/web/static (committed)

Commands

make install        # deps + editable install + frontend deps
make test           # or test-unit / test-integration / test-e2e ...
make dev            # mcphawk up on :8484 + Vite on :5173
make build-frontend # then commit mcphawk/web/static; CI fails if it is stale
make demo           # demo traffic from three SDK servers

Read the full file on GitHub · 72 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.

1mo ago First seen · 72 lines · 1,014 tokens per session scan A e764fbcb7a43

Subscribe to this mod's changes

mcphawk AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository tech4242/mcphawk (16 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 1,014 tokens to every session, about $0.0041 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 2026-09-24.

Building agents Debugging ai logging mcp monitoring networking

mcphawk AGENTS.md next to 6 instructions from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
mcphawk AGENTS.mdtech4242/mcphawk	Instructions file	16	1mo ago	MIT	A	1,014	Codex, OpenCode
vscode buildNext.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	9,719	GitHub Copilot
next.js AGENTS.mdvercel/next.js	Instructions file	143k	yesterday	MIT	A	7,461	Codex, OpenCode
langchain AGENTS.mdlangchain-ai/langchain	Instructions file	149k	yesterday	MIT	A	4,680	Codex, OpenCode
vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	5,516	GitHub Copilot
vscode copilot-instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	3,093	GitHub Copilot
deepseek-harness AGENTS.mddeepseek-ai/deepseek-harness	Instructions file	274k	2d ago	MIT	A	4,313	Codex, OpenCode

mcphawk: Instructions file for Codex