agents-md

agents-md is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Ghosteken/agent-harness. It costs 62 tokens per session (1,156 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of agents-md, MIT.

Guidance for creating and maintaining AGENTS.md, a short file that tells coding agents how a project is organised and how its commands work. It also covers linking the same instructions through CLAUDE.md.

In plain words
What is it for?
Creating, updating, or auditing agent instructions by checking package managers, formatting tools, build commands, and whether the project is a monorepo—a repository containing multiple related projects.
Why use it?
Project instructions can become long, duplicated, or out of date, making agents less reliable. This keeps them short and based on the project's actual tools and structure.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the agent-harness plugin — 173 skills, 11 commands, 12 agents shipped together

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 skills/ghosteken/agent-harness/agents-md
Any agent
npx skills add Ghosteken/agent-harness --skill agents-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Ghosteken/agent-harness

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agent-harness, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 173 skills, 11 commands, 12 agents.

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 agents-md

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ghosteken/agent-harness/agents-md.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ghosteken/agent-harness/agents-md)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ghosteken/agent-harness/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ghosteken/agent-harness/agents-md.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 62 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,156 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 94% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00062 $0.01156
Opus 5 $0.00031 $0.00578
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00231
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00116

Measured 5d ago against content hash e198718a68c1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 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.

Origin

This is a copy

94% identical to agents-md — 6 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

archive/skills-community/agents-md/SKILL.md · 131 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 131 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Maintaining AGENTS.md

AGENTS.md is the canonical agent-facing documentation. Keep it minimal—agents are capable and don't need hand-holding. Target under 60 lines; never exceed 100. Instruction-following quality degrades as document length increases.

When to Use

  • The user asks to create, update, or audit AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md.
  • The project needs concise, high-signal agent instructions derived from the actual toolchain and repo layout.
  • Existing agent documentation is too long, duplicated, or drifting away from real project conventions.

File Setup

  1. Create AGENTS.md at project root
  2. Create symlink: ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md

Before Writing

Analyze the project to understand what belongs in the file:

  1. Package manager — Check for lock files (pnpm-lock.yaml, yarn.lock, package-lock.json, uv.lock, poetry.lock)
  2. Linter/formatter configs — Look for .eslintrc, biome.json, ruff.toml, .prettierrc, etc. (don't duplicate these in AGENTS.md)
  3. CI/build commands — Check Makefile, package.json scripts, CI configs for canonical commands
  4. Monorepo indicators — Check for pnpm-workspace.yaml, nx.json, Cargo workspace, or subdirectory package.json files
  5. Existing conventions — Check for existing CONTRIBUTING.md, docs/, or README patterns

Writing Rules

  • Headers + bullets — No paragraphs
  • Code blocks — For commands and templates
  • Reference, don't embed — Point to existing docs: "See CONTRIBUTING.md for setup" or "Follow patterns in src/api/routes/"
  • No filler — No intros, conclusions, or pleasantries
  • Trust capabilities — Omit obvious context
  • Prefer file-scoped commands — Per-file test/lint/typecheck commands over project-wide builds
  • Don't duplicate linters — Code style lives in linter configs, not AGENTS.md

Required Sections

Package Manager

Which tool and key commands only:

## Package Manager
Use **pnpm**: `pnpm install`, `pnpm dev`, `pnpm test`

Read the full file on GitHub · 131 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 · 131 lines · 62 tokens per session scan A e198718a68c1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agents-md is a skill published in the GitHub repository Ghosteken/agent-harness (2 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 62 tokens to every session and 1,156 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 94% identical to agents-md, differing in 6 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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