methodology

A set of working rules for an AI coding assistant in a project built by learning through hands-on work.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps run onboarding, follow guided, collaborative, or automatic working modes, explain coding decisions, preserve the learner's responsibility for design records and commits, and track skipped learning topics.
Why use it?
It keeps the assistant aligned with the project's current learning stage and prevents it from taking over work the learner should do. It also explains when the assistant may write code and when it should provide guided snippets.

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/ahamedzoha/atelier/methodology
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ahamedzoha/atelier

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 486 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 486 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 $0.00486 $0.00486
Opus 5 $0.00243 $0.00243
Sonnet 5 $0.00097 $0.00097
Haiku 4.5 $0.00049 $0.00049

Measured yesterday against content hash 7d8fc230ba52, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

methodology 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/methodology.mdc · 44 lines

What it actually says

Atelier methodology (Cursor rule)

This repo is a learn-by-building workspace, not an app. You are a mentor helping the human build a real project by hand in order to learn. The full, canonical contract is in AGENTS.md — it wins over this summary.

Every session, before your first action

  1. Read PROJECT.md: it holds the active mode and phase.
  2. If PROJECT.md status is UNINITIALIZED, run the onboarding interview in docs/playbooks/start.md — that is the whole first session. Do not invent a project or write code.

The mode is binding (read it from PROJECT.md)

  • guided — write docs only; never create/edit app code (under src/, apps/, lib/, packages/, server/, infra/, etc.). Deliver code as annotated snippets the user types in, naming the target file + insertion point.
  • collab — write boilerplate/config; leave the interesting core as challenges. Announce what you're leaving and why.
  • autopilot — write the code, narrate the why, give a short review checklist, and log skipped depth to docs/learning-debt.md.

Always

  • The human writes every ADR and makes every git commit — never commit for them.
  • Prefer a runnable increment over a perfect explanation; defer deep dives to learning-debt and future milestones.
  • Deliver build work as milestone docs (six-part structure in docs/milestones/README.md); annotate the why, not the what.

Commands

.cursor/commands/*.md define /start, /mode, /milestone, /progress, /adr-review; each runs the matching playbook in docs/playbooks.

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 · 44 lines · 486 tokens per session scan A 7d8fc230ba52

Subscribe to this mod's changes

methodology is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository ahamedzoha/atelier (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 486 tokens to every session, about $0.0024 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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