AWS Startups is an official AWS repository containing plugins, skills, tools, and other resources for people building startup products on Amazon Web Services. Its add-ons support startup-focused architecture, migration, and development work on AWS.
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 skills/awslabs/startups/tf-best-practicesnpx skills add awslabs/startups --skill tf-best-practicesgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/awslabs/startupsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/awslabs/startups/tf-best-practices)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/awslabs/startups/tf-best-practices"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/awslabs/startups/tf-best-practices.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00107 | $0.02602 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00053 | $0.01301 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00021 | $0.00520 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00260 |
Grade A, and why
tf-best-practices 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 6d 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 — 200 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
tf-best-practices — Generated-IaC posture rules + read-only policy gate
A shared authoring guide and verdict producer, not a workflow. It answers two questions for a phase that generates AWS Terraform:
- Before writing — "what security posture must the generated
terraform/follow?" (the posture rules + thebaseline.tfaccount-hardening spec) - After writing — "does the generated
terraform/pass policy?" (a deterministic, read-only verdict + a machine-readable report)
Routing — load the part that matches your context
This skill is entered at two touchpoints in the caller's Generate flow, with the caller's own terraform-authoring work in between. The caller states which touchpoint it is at when it loads this skill, and reads the corresponding part:
| Caller context | Load | Why |
|---|---|---|
About to author terraform/ (before writing) |
Part 1 → references/security-posture-rules.md |
The "what to emit" AWS authoring rules (gate-enforced + authoring-only + compliance-conditional). |
terraform/ written, ready to validate (after writing) |
Part 2 → references/terraform-validation.md + run the gate script |
The fmt → init → validate → policy protocol and the read-only verdict. |
Everything this skill states is source-cloud-agnostic (pure AWS Terraform). Any GCP/Heroku
detection or artifact reading is the caller's job; where a rule needs a caller-known fact (e.g.
declared compliance frameworks), the caller passes it as a caller-context signal — see
references/security-posture-rules.md § Caller-context signals.
What ships with it
28 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
- .gitignore 51 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/bad-db-sg-public-quoted-port/vpc.tf 514 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/bad-db-sg-public/vpc.tf 356 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/bad-elasticache-unencrypted/cache.tf 422 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/bad-http-forward/compute.tf 556 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/bad-rds-public-brace-in-comment/main.tf 690 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/bad-rds-public-closing-brace/main.tf 692 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/bad-rds-public-interpolated-brace/rds.tf 903 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/bad-rds-public-unencrypted/database.tf 372 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/bad-sg-public-ipv6/vpc.tf 1.1 KB
- fixtures/terraform-policy/bad-sg-public-ssh/vpc.tf 537 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/bad-wildcard-iam-listform/security.tf 470 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/bad-wildcard-iam/security.tf 381 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/good-db-sg-scoped/vpc.tf 986 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/good-elasticache-encrypted/cache.tf 749 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/good-https-redirect/compute.tf 1008 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/good-iam-scoped-list/security.tf 573 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/good-internet-nlb/compute.tf 621 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/good-quoted-port-https/compute.tf 1.3 KB
- fixtures/terraform-policy/good-rds-private-encrypted/database.tf 607 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/good-scoped-iam/security.tf 744 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/good-sg-ipv6-scoped/vpc.tf 1.0 KB
- fixtures/terraform-policy/good-sg-public-webapp/vpc.tf 989 B
- fixtures/terraform-policy/internal-alb-only/compute.tf 555 B
- references/security-posture-rules.md 15 KB
- references/terraform-validation.md 9.0 KB
- scripts/test_validate_terraform_policy.py 29 KB runs code
- scripts/validate-terraform-policy.py 39 KB runs code
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.
- 6d ago First seen · 200 lines · 107 tokens per session scan A 55607f45d3f8
tf-best-practices is a skill published in the GitHub repository awslabs/startups (17 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 107 tokens to every session and 2,602 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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