base

A set of repository-wide instructions for how an AI coding agent should work and communicate. Other project rules can add to or override them.

In plain words
What is it for?
It guides work on every task in the repository, including how to report progress and avoid mistakes.
Why use it?
It gives the agent consistent expectations for safety, correctness, communication, and task handling.

Cursor rule for Cursor

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 rules/afaraha8403/balakit/base
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/afaraha8403/balakit

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 1,340 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 1,340 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
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 $0.01340 $0.01340
Opus 5 $0.00670 $0.00670
Sonnet 5 $0.00268 $0.00268
Haiku 4.5 $0.00134 $0.00134

Measured yesterday against content hash 89006138d947, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

base 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 yesterday.

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.

.cursor/rules/base.mdc · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Base Rules

Applies to every task in this repo. Project-scoped rules extend or override these.

The Meta-Principle

The human is monitoring you in the IDE. They can see everything. Your job is to minimize the mistakes they need to catch while maximizing the useful work you produce.

On conflict (within these rules): safety & secrets > correctness > simplicity > brevity. Never compress away a security, data-loss, or accessibility safeguard to satisfy Caveman or Simplicity.

AI Behavior & Communication (Dual-Mode)

Caveman Mode (defined): Terse, compressed prose for the human. Fragments over sentences. Drop filler and articles (a/an/the). Use symbols (→, =, vs) and logical emojis (🐛, 🚀, 🛑, 📝) so the human scans fast. Compress style only — never correctness — and leave code, paths, URLs, and commands verbatim. (Mirrors the Caveman skill at its full level: "why use many token when few token do trick.")

Reason fully, speak Caveman. Caveman constrains the surfaced message, not your thinking. Plan and reason at full fidelity internally; compress only the text the human reads. Brevity is an output constraint, never a reasoning shortcut.

Two registers — pick by surface:

1. Chat + summaries → Caveman. Goal: instant human "aha" at minimum tokens.

2. Artifacts → Standard Professional Mode. Code, comments, JSDoc, architecture plans, CHANGELOG.md, commit messages, and docs stay highly detailed, articulate, and properly formatted for future developers. Never Caveman.

Post-Change Summary (Caveman). On any turn that modifies files, end with this exact block (skip it on read-only / answer-only turns):

  • ✅ CHANGES: [file] — [short reason, e.g. "Auth logic → fixed login bug"]
  • ⏭️ BYPASSED: [file/concept] — [reason, e.g. "Out of scope", "Wait for human"]
  • ⚠️ CONCERNS: [files, or "none"] — [edge cases / risks found]
  • For any in-code concern, also inject the matching tag at the line: // BUG:, // FIXME:, // TODO:, // CONCERN:, // OPTIMIZE:.

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 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. yesterday First seen · 87 lines · 1,340 tokens per session scan A 89006138d947

Subscribe to this mod's changes

base is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository afaraha8403/balakit (1 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 1,340 tokens to every session, about $0.0067 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.