What is assay-golden-path?

A guided procedure for installing and checking Assay, including reading its output and exit codes. Assay is the project being operated or diagnosed by this procedure.

Use it to run Assay’s nine-step install-to-evidence process, diagnose outcomes, and follow the project’s authoritative command contract.

It prevents missing output or a successful technical exchange from being mistaken for a successful operation or permitted action.

How Rul1an/assay configures Claude Code and Codex

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to Rul1an/assay. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Rul1an/assay/main/.agents/skills/assay-golden-path/SKILL.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Rul1an/assay

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rul1an/assay/assay-golden-path/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rul1an/assay/assay-golden-path)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rul1an/assay/assay-golden-path"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rul1an/assay/assay-golden-path/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rul1an/assay/assay-golden-path"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rul1an/assay/assay-golden-path.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 56 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,246 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00056	$0.02246
Opus 5.5	$0.00022	$0.00898
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00011	$0.00449
Haiku 4.5	$0.00006	$0.00225

Measured 25d ago against content hash 2a1303ed47a6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

assay-golden-path 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 25d 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.

.agents/skills/assay-golden-path/SKILL.md · 128 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 128 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Assay Golden Path

Drive the nine steps below in order. Read stdout and the process exit code separately; a policy denial can be a successful JSON-RPC exchange rather than a process failure.

docs/generated/agent-golden-path.json is the authoritative machine contract. Read it when exact argv, fields, or per-outcome metadata are needed. Edit and run scripts/docs/generate-agent-golden-path.py instead of editing this file.

When a step has no working_directory, run it from the invocation cwd. A present working_directory is a POSIX path relative to the source repository. Replace <python> with python3 on Unix-like hosts or python on Windows.

Empty stdout in a gap row is an observed limitation, not permission for a caller to infer success from missing evidence. Do not replace a linked gap with an inferred clean result.

Codex and Claude Code are the project-skill hosts exercised here. Cursor's skill documentation (https://cursor.com/docs/skills), accessed on 2026-08-09, describes .agents/skills as a project-level location and .claude/skills as a compatibility location. This repository does not exercise Cursor runtime discovery.

Journey

1. Install check

Run: assay version

Exit: Success 0.

Stdout: One MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH line.

On failure: A missing or unstartable binary is a host spawn failure: no Assay process runs, so Assay produces no stdout or exit code.

2. Preflight

Run: assay doctor --format json --config <config>

Exit: Success 0; no config examined 0; config examined, error-severity diagnostic 2; absent explicit config 2; invalid explicit config 2.

Stdout: Parses as assay.doctor_report.v0. Every report carries config_check.status, one of checked, skipped or failed. Exit 0 on its own does not mean a config was examined: read config_check.status to tell a clean config from no config. A config that was examined and carries an error-severity data_diagnostics[] entry exits 2, the class decide_exit gives that diagnostic for assay validate and assay run too; the text channel returns the same class for the same tree. A config failure remains JSON and carries the top-level reason_code and next_step alongside config_error.code.

Read the full file on GitHub · 128 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.

25d ago Changed 2a1303ed47a6
1mo ago Changed · +1 lines c9814adf201d
1mo ago Changed 2c093a69fae6
2mo ago Changed 6676d9a28ec1
2mo ago First seen · 127 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A 0b30e1d80946

Subscribe to this mod's changes

assay-golden-path is a skill published in the GitHub repository Rul1an/assay (15 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 56 tokens to every session and 2,246 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.

Debugging Rust ai-agents mcp mcp-server policy-as-code policy-enforcement

assay-golden-path next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
assay-golden-pathRul1an/assay	Skill	15	yesterday	MIT	A	56	Claude Code, Codex
cortex-snippetsdinglebear-ai/cortex	Skill	4	3d ago	AGPL-3.0	A	51	Claude Code, Codex
using-cortexdinglebear-ai/cortex	Skill	4	3d ago	AGPL-3.0	A	58	Claude Code, Codex
n8n-error-handlingczlonkowski/n8n-mcp	Skill	23k	yesterday	MIT	A	128	Claude Code, Codex
agentcore-investigationawslabs/mcp	Skill	9.9k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	52	Claude Code, Codex
moli-webfetchlexmount/moli	Skill	23k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	90	Codex
feedbackHmbown/Codewhale	Skill	41k	1mo ago	MIT	A	0	Claude Code, Codex

assay: Skill for Claude Code