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.
npx agentmods add instructions/yaalalabs/agent-kernel/agents-mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yaalalabs/agent-kernelWhat 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 | $0.02326 | $0.02326 |
| Opus 5 | $0.01163 | $0.01163 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00465 | $0.00465 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00233 | $0.00233 |
Grade A, and why
agent-kernel 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 151 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
AGENTS.md
Guidance for AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex, Windsurf, etc.) working on the Agent Kernel codebase itself. If you're building an agent with Agent Kernel, see the README and kernel.yaala.ai/docs instead — this file is for contributors to this repo.
Two skill sets — don't confuse them
This repo ships two unrelated sets of "skills," named similarly but serving opposite audiences:
| Skill set | Location | Audience | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dev skills | .agents/skills/ak-dev-* | You, working on this repo | Architecture, testing conventions, code quality, and step-by-step guides for adding a new framework adapter / guardrail / knowledge base / messaging integration / tracing provider / multimodal storage / sandbox provider / queue transport to Agent Kernel core |
| Bundled skills | ak-py/src/agentkernel/skills/ (ak-init, ak-build, ak-add-capabilities, ak-add-integration, ak-cloud-deploy, ak-test) |
End users of the agentkernel PyPI package |
Shipped inside the package so a downstream developer's coding assistant can scaffold and extend agents built with Agent Kernel |
If a task is about changing Agent Kernel's own source, use the dev skills under .agents/skills/.
Never edit the bundled skills to document a dev-only workflow, and never edit the dev skills to
change end-user-facing scaffolding behavior — read the description in each SKILL.md before
editing either.
Before non-trivial changes to core, load .agents/skills/ak-dev-architecture — it covers
Session, Agent, Runner, Module, Runtime, AgentService, ChatService (and which layer
each surface calls), AKConfig, hooks, tools, multimodal, conversation threads, and the ECS
containerized deployment classes in depth. Don't re-derive this from
scratch by grepping; the skill is maintained precisely so agents don't have to.
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 151 lines · 2,326 tokens per session scan A f9ce35cec19b
agent-kernel AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository yaalalabs/agent-kernel (145 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 2,326 tokens to every session, about $0.0116 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.
Other instructions, from other repositories
awesome-kubernetes CLAUDE.md
Instructions for nubenetes/awesome-kubernetes, covering claude.md — nubenetes project instructions for claude code, git workflow: gitflow, branches, release process (mandatory for all releases) and versioning.
awesome-kubernetes GEMINI.md
Instructions for nubenetes/awesome-kubernetes, covering 🧠 core mandates, 🛠️ structural evolution & navigation, 📊 mermaid diagram best practices, 🛡️ repository policies & branch protection and 📝 readme synchronization & maintenance protocols.
aurora AGENTS.md
Instructions for Arvo-AI/aurora, covering aurora - agent guidelines, commands, docker deployments, architecture and secrets management (vault).
drawio-ai-kit AGENTS.md
Instructions for sparklabx/drawio-ai-kit, covering repository guidelines, tech stack & runtime and code conventions & common patterns.
adk CLAUDE.md
Instructions for inference-gateway/adk, covering claude.md, what this repo is, commands, architecture and server (server/).
IsaacAutomator AGENTS.md
Instructions for isaac-sim/IsaacAutomator, covering isaac automator - agent instructions, operator quickstart (the short version), rules for agents (read before acting) and map.