agents-md

agents-md is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from mblode/agent-skills. It costs 67 tokens per session (2,800 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A setup and audit workflow for AGENTS.md and related instruction files used by coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to set up agent instructions, review existing AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md files, find missing execution details, and rewrite rules around real project commands and failure cases.
Why use it?
It removes vague or excessive rules and makes the remaining instructions useful across the tools working in the repository.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the agent-skills plugin — 27 skills 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/mblode/agent-skills/agents-md
Any agent
npx skills add mblode/agent-skills --skill agents-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mblode/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agent-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 27 skills.

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/mblode/agent-skills/agents-md.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mblode/agent-skills/agents-md)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mblode/agent-skills/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mblode/agent-skills/agents-md.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 67 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,800 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00067 $0.02800
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.01400
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00560
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00280

Measured today against content hash 67b88e5b32f7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, 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 today.

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.

skills/agents-md/SKILL.md · 138 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 138 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

AGENTS.md Setup and Audit

  • IS: wiring a repo so every agent tool in use reads the same rules, then auditing, scoring, refactoring, and writing the AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md / CLAUDE.local.md files agents load at session start.
  • IS NOT: authoring SKILL.md files (use agent-skills-creator), project docs or READMEs (use docs-writing or readme-creator), or mining session history (use the external cadence-advise skill where installed; this skill audits the file as-is).

AGENTS.md files are execution contracts, not knowledge bases. Two tests catch the two ways a line fails.

  • Dead weight: "Would removing this cause the agent to make a mistake?" If no, cut it; bloat makes agents ignore the rules that matter.
  • Harmful precision: "Is this wrong on any plausible task in this repo?" A prohibition that is wrong one task in ten is still obeyed on that task, and the agent cannot tell that this is the exception. State the outcome you want and let the surrounding code pick the path. NEVER write comments becomes match the comment density of the file you are editing: shorter, no exception list to maintain, and correct in a densely commented file without being told.

Absolutes still earn their place for safety, data loss, format contracts, and rules this repo's agents have actually been observed to break.

AGENTS.md is the tool-agnostic source of truth: Codex, Cursor, Copilot, and the rest of the agents.md list read it natively. Claude Code is the exception. It reads CLAUDE.md, not AGENTS.md, so a repo that uses Claude Code needs a CLAUDE.md whose first line is @AGENTS.md (or a CLAUDE.md -> AGENTS.md symlink when there are no Claude-only additions). If only a CLAUDE.md exists and another tool is in use, git mv CLAUDE.md AGENTS.md and add the pointer file; a copy of either drifts.

Choose a Mode

  • Repo has no agent instructions, or targets a tool it is not wired for -> Setup: references/project-setup.md decides which files exist and which tool reads each one, then Writing From Scratch below fills the root file, then Audit scores it.
  • A file exists and the question is quality -> Audit, below.
  • A file exists and is bloated, stale, or scored badly -> Refactor, references/refactor-workflow.md.

Read the full file on GitHub · 138 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 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.

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. today Changed · -6 lines · -165 tokens per session 67b88e5b32f7
  2. 5d ago First seen · 144 lines · 232 tokens per session scan A e5104a3ac6ef

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agents-md is a skill published in the GitHub repository mblode/agent-skills (102 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 2,800 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 2026-08-30.