book-brain AGENTS.md

book-brain AGENTS.md is an instructions file for Codex, OpenCode from xjli1972/book-brain. It costs 1,375 tokens per session, scanned A, original, MIT.

Instructions for book-brain, a personal search system for free and open-source books. It stores book sections, indexes them for meaning-based search, and provides tools to search and read them.

In plain words
What is it for?
They help an agent ingest books, update the search index, find relevant sections, read source material, and respect the separation between the code and stored book data.
Why use it?
They tell an agent where the books and index live, how to add books, and which data should be treated as the source of truth.

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/xjli1972/book-brain/agents-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/xjli1972/book-brain

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.

agentmods badge for book-brain AGENTS.md

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/xjli1972/book-brain/agents-md.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/xjli1972/book-brain/agents-md)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/xjli1972/book-brain/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/xjli1972/book-brain/agents-md.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 1,375 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 1,375 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 $0.01375 $0.01375
Opus 5 $0.00687 $0.00687
Sonnet 5 $0.00275 $0.00275
Haiku 4.5 $0.00137 $0.00137

Measured 5d ago against content hash 42661c03f2d1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

book-brain 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 5d 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 — operating the book-brain

Use this file as the agent contract for book-brain. It mirrors GBrain's AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md split: tell the agent what the brain is, how to grow it, how to query it, and where the trust boundaries are.

What the brain is

book-brain is a personal RAG over open-source / free books. Each book splits into per-section markdown pages on disk; SQLite + sqlite-vec is the index; an MCP server exposes search and read tools.

  • Source of truth (runtime data): $BOOKBRAIN_ROOT/books/<slug>/ and $BOOKBRAIN_ROOT/concepts/. Defaults to ~/book-brain/ if BOOKBRAIN_ROOT is unset.
  • Index: $BOOKBRAIN_ROOT/db.sqlite.
  • Embedding model: nomic-embed-text via Ollama at http://localhost:11434.
  • Repo (read-only code): wherever the user cloned this repository. The repo is the engine; the brain is the runtime data directory. Keep them separate.

How to grow the brain

To add a new book (run from the repo, against your runtime brain):

npx tsx src/cli.ts ingest /path/to/book.epub
npx tsx src/cli.ts embed

Both commands are idempotent on the page content hash. Re-running ingest on an updated EPUB only re-embeds chunks whose body actually changed.

When choosing a book to add:

  1. Verify the license. Public domain, CC, or "free online" with the author's blessing — yes. DRM'd or strictly commercial — no.
  2. Prefer EPUB. PDFs need a separate pdf2epub step; HTML directories need a custom adapter (out of scope for v0).
  3. Sanity-check the slug. bookbrain ingest --slug <override> if the auto-derived one collides or reads badly.

How to query

For agents, prefer the MCP tools (start with search, drill into read_page):

Tool When to use
search Always start here. Returns ranked passages with vec_rank, fts_rank, backlinks, score, snippet, slug.
read_page Once you've picked a slug from search, get the full markdown.
concept_neighborhood Exploring a topic. Returns mentioning pages + co-occurring concepts (depth=2).
list_books Before constraining a search to one book.
stats Sanity check that the brain is populated and embedded.

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. 5d ago First seen · 124 lines · 1,375 tokens per session scan A 42661c03f2d1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

book-brain AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository xjli1972/book-brain (5 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 1,375 tokens to every session, about $0.0069 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 2026-08-31.