APM is a package manager for AI-agent configuration, using a manifest to declare reusable instructions, skills, prompts, agents, hooks, plugins, and MCP components. Development teams use it to reproduce agent setups across projects and control their dependencies through policies and lockfiles, while the catalogue contains many of these agent components.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to microsoft/apm. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/apm/main/.agents/skills/apm-spec-guardian/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/apmWrote 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/microsoft/apm/apm-spec-guardian)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/apm/apm-spec-guardian"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/apm/apm-spec-guardian.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 | $0.00215 | $0.04815 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00108 | $0.02407 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00043 | $0.00963 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00021 | $0.00481 |
Grade A, and why
apm-spec-guardian 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 7d 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 — 395 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
APM Spec Guardian -- Four-Panel Advisory Review for OpenAPM
This skill institutionalizes the two-round adversarial spec review
that produced OpenAPM v0.1 by hand. The panel is FAN-OUT +
SYNTHESIZER. Each panelist runs in its own agent thread (via the
task tool) and returns JSON matching
assets/panelist-return-schema.json. The orchestrator schema-validates
each return, hands all returns to the spec-editor-synthesizer
(also a task thread, returns JSON matching
assets/synthesizer-return-schema.json), runs the linter checklist
in assets/linter-checklist.md, then renders ONE comment from
assets/comment-template.md.
This skill is ADVISORY by design. It does not compute a binary verdict, it does not apply verdict labels, and it does not gate merge. The panel surfaces findings; the maintainer ships.
Activation scope
This skill activates ONLY when the PR diff touches at least one of:
docs/src/content/docs/specs/openapm-*.md(the normative spec artifact, current and future versions)docs/src/content/docs/specs/schemas/*.schema.json(sidecar JSON Schemas, if/when the inline Appendix-A schemas are extracted to files)tests/fixtures/spec-conformance/**(the conformance fixture seed)
Edits to any OTHER documentation page MUST NOT trigger this skill.
The maintainer's general docs-sync skill covers those.
Architecture invariants
- Advisory regime, not gate regime. There is no
APPROVE/REJECT, nospec-approved/spec-rejectedlabel, no deterministic verdict computation. The synthesizer returns aship_decision(fold_and_ship/needs_revision/next_brief); this is prose for the human reviewer, never auto-applied as a label or status check. - Ship-meter floor.
ship_decision: fold_and_shipREQUIRESshocked_meter_avg >= 7.0. Below 7.0 the synthesizer MUST emitneeds_revision(single drafter pass on the existing artifact) ornext_brief(another round of panel review with a new brief). The floor is advisory wording in the comment, not a status check. - Blocker veto. If ANY panelist returns
new_blocking_findings[].length > 0, the synthesizer MUST emitship_decision: next_briefregardless of the shocked_meter_avg. A blocking finding from one panel is not outweighed by three panels rating the artifact 9/10. - Single-writer interlock. Only the orchestrator writes to the
PR: exactly one
add-commentcall and oneremove-labelscall. Theremove-labelscall sweepsspec-review(trigger idempotency). NOadd-labelscall -- there are no verdict labels. Panelist subagents and the synthesizer subagent return JSON only and MUST NOT call anyghwrite command, post comments, apply labels, or touch PR state. - Single-emission discipline. Exactly one comment per panel run,
rendered from
assets/comment-template.mdafter all subagents return and the linter checklist runs. - ASCII-only artifact. Every byte the skill writes (the comment,
the synthesizer prose, any rendered fold instruction) MUST be
within printable ASCII (U+0020 - U+007E). The skill inherits the
repo encoding rule from
.github/instructions/encoding.instructions.md(if present) and additionally enforces it on the spec artifact via linter check 1. - No-vendor-foundation language ban. The spec artifact MUST NOT contain "CNCF", "Linux Foundation", "Sandbox", "Incubation", "W3C Process", or "IETF RFC stream". The persona prompts MAY reference these as pedigree (a panelist's credibility comes from having edited OpenAPI; that does not put OpenAPI's foundation affiliation in the spec text). Linter check 2 greps the artifact for the forbidden token list AFTER any fold.
What ships with it
4 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.
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.
- 7d ago First seen · 395 lines · 215 tokens per session scan A 5e2b98792b45
apm-spec-guardian is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/apm (3,735 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 215 tokens to every session and 4,815 once invoked, about $0.0011 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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