A guide to AGENTS.md, a file that gives coding agents project-specific instructions. It explains how agents discover these files from global settings down through the project folders, with deeper rules taking priority.

Use it when creating, reviewing, or troubleshooting AGENTS.md and AGENTS.override.md files, their discovery order, scope, and precedence.

It clarifies which instructions apply in a repository and how to structure them without exceeding the combined file-size limit.

agents-md — Cursor rule for Cursor by nedcodes-ok

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.

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nedcodes-ok/cursorrules-collection

Made for: Cursor.

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/rules/nedcodes-ok/cursorrules-collection/agents-md/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/rules/nedcodes-ok/cursorrules-collection/agents-md)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/nedcodes-ok/cursorrules-collection/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/nedcodes-ok/cursorrules-collection/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/rules/nedcodes-ok/cursorrules-collection/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/nedcodes-ok/cursorrules-collection/agents-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.

When invoked 742 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

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	$0.00000	$0.00742
Opus 5.5	$0.00000	$0.00297
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00000	$0.00148
Haiku 4.5	$0.00000	$0.00074

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 440e1c945262, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 2mo 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.

rules-mdc/ai-tools/agents-md.mdc · 45 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 45 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

AGENTS.md Rules

AGENTS.md is the instruction file for OpenAI Codex (and increasingly, other tools like GitHub Copilot coding agent, Zed, and OpenCode). It's loaded once per session before any work begins.

Discovery Chain

Global: ~/.codex/AGENTS.md (or AGENTS.override.md if it exists — override takes priority, only one file at this level)
Project: Starting from the Git root, Codex walks down to your current working directory, checking each directory for AGENTS.override.md then AGENTS.md. At most one file per directory
Merge order: Files concatenate root-to-leaf, separated by blank lines. Later files override earlier guidance because they appear last in the combined prompt
Size limit: 32 KiB combined by default (project_doc_max_bytes config). If you hit it, split instructions into subdirectory files

What Goes In AGENTS.md

Working agreements: "Always run npm test after modifying JavaScript files," "Prefer pnpm when installing dependencies"
Verification commands: How to build, test, lint, typecheck. Codex runs these to validate its own changes
Repo conventions: naming patterns, directory structure expectations, PR requirements
Tool preferences: which package manager, which test runner, which formatter — Codex won't guess correctly without this

Override Files

AGENTS.override.md in any directory replaces AGENTS.md at that same level — useful for temporary overrides without editing the base file
Common use: a services/payments/AGENTS.override.md that says "use make test-payments instead of npm test" for that specific service
Delete the override to restore the base instructions

Patterns That Work

Keep global (~/.codex/AGENTS.md) minimal — personal preferences that apply everywhere (coding style, preferred tools, commit message format)
Project root AGENTS.md handles repo-wide setup: build commands, CI expectations, PR conventions
Subdirectory overrides for teams/services with different tooling or constraints
Commands first, conventions second — Codex needs to know how to verify its work before anything else

Read the full file on GitHub · 45 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.

2mo ago First seen · 45 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 440e1c945262

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agents-md is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository nedcodes-ok/cursorrules-collection (38 stars, last pushed 8mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 742 tokens. 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.

Building agents ai-coding cursor cursor-ai cursor-rules cursorrules dotcursorrules

agents-md next to 6 cursor rules from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
agents-mdnedcodes-ok/cursorrules-collection	Cursor rule	38	8mo ago	MIT	A	0	Cursor
23-app-startuporbitalsonic/AndroidPilot	Cursor rule	1	11d ago	none	A	0	Cursor
30-screen-languageorbitalsonic/AndroidPilot	Cursor rule	1	11d ago	none	A	0	Cursor
01-feature-checklistorbitalsonic/AndroidPilot	Cursor rule	1	11d ago	none	A	36	Cursor
06-coroutines-floworbitalsonic/AndroidPilot	Cursor rule	1	11d ago	none	A	0	Cursor
09-resources-xmlorbitalsonic/AndroidPilot	Cursor rule	1	11d ago	none	A	0	Cursor
10-manifestorbitalsonic/AndroidPilot	Cursor rule	1	11d ago	none	A	0	Cursor