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 skills add jonZlotnik/how-to-agent --skill rule-of-textualitygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jonZlotnik/how-to-agentWrote 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/jonzlotnik/how-to-agent/rule-of-textuality)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jonzlotnik/how-to-agent/rule-of-textuality"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jonzlotnik/how-to-agent/rule-of-textuality/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jonzlotnik/how-to-agent/rule-of-textuality"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jonzlotnik/how-to-agent/rule-of-textuality.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" 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 | $0.00051 | $0.00593 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00026 | $0.00296 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00010 | $0.00119 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00059 |
Grade A, and why
rule-of-textuality 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 12d 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 — 37 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Rule of Textuality
Plain text is the universal solvent. Anything textual can be grep'd, diff'd, version-controlled, fixed by hand at 3am, and inspected by tools nobody has written yet. Binary formats foreclose all of that for a transient gain — usually one nobody actually measured.
When to use
- Picking a config or interchange format (text vs binary)
- Designing a log format, on-disk format, or IPC payload
- Tempted to introduce protobuf/MessagePack/custom struct dumps for "performance"
- Reviewing an opaque blob that can only be read by the program that wrote it
Protocol
- Pick textual by default — JSON, TOML, YAML, RFC-822 style, CSV, line-record formats. Whatever fits the structure of the data with the least ceremony.
- Require a measured reason to go binary. "Throughput", "size", "speed" need a profile and a budget, not vibes. Often the text version is good enough by orders of magnitude.
- If you must use binary, build a text twin. A
--dumpor--inspectmode that emits the equivalent text representation. Never ship a format you can't print. - Make textual formats line-oriented when you can. One record per line means standard tools (grep, awk, cut, sort, uniq, head, tail) just work — for free, forever.
- Be conservative about format choice. Cute custom syntax is a forever cost; existing standards (JSON, INI, RFC-822) are free leverage.
Red flags (rationalizations to reject)
- "Text is too slow / too big." — Measure. For most workloads the gap is invisible; for the rest, compression is one pipe stage away.
- "Nobody reads it by hand." — Until the day production breaks and you'd kill for the ability to.
- "Binary is more typed/safer." — Type safety belongs in the parser, not the byte layout. A schema'd text format gives you both.
Composes with
- [[rule-of-composition]] — text is what pipelines speak; binary breaks the chain.
- [[rule-of-robustness]] — textual formats let you be liberal in what you accept and audit what you emit.
- [[prove-dont-assume]] — text means you can actually see the bytes when something looks wrong, instead of trusting the marshaller.
- [[dry-audit]] — a textual canonical format prevents the "code knows X, fixture knows Y, doc says Z" drift.
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.
- 12d ago First seen · 37 lines · 51 tokens per session scan A 2f2afabee35b
rule-of-textuality is a skill published in the GitHub repository jonZlotnik/how-to-agent (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 51 tokens to every session and 593 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.
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