api-design

A guide for designing REST and GraphQL APIs. REST APIs use web addresses and HTTP requests to work with resources such as users or posts.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design, review, or extend APIs, including resource routes, request and error formats, pagination, versioning, and access controls.
Why use it?
It helps make API behavior predictable by standardizing names, status codes, versioning, errors, pagination, and authentication patterns.

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/andr-ca/agentharness/api-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/andr-ca/agentharness

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 36 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,494 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 $0.00036 $0.01494
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00747
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00299
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00149

Measured yesterday against content hash b8f408c067a0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

api-design 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/api-design.mdc · 166 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 166 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

API Design

Design choices for HTTP APIs (REST-style and GraphQL). The goal is an API that is consistent, predictable, and easy to evolve without breaking callers.

Reference: Google API Design Guide, JSON:API, RFC 9457 (Problem Details for HTTP APIs).

Resource naming (REST)

Use nouns, not verbs. Collections are plural.

GET    /users              → list users
POST   /users              → create a user
GET    /users/{id}         → get one user
PATCH  /users/{id}         → partial update
PUT    /users/{id}         → full replace
DELETE /users/{id}         → delete

GET    /users/{id}/posts   → posts belonging to a user
POST   /users/{id}/posts   → create a post for a user

Actions that don't map cleanly to CRUD go on a sub-resource with a verb:

POST   /users/{id}/activate
POST   /payments/{id}/refund

Naming rules:

  • kebab-case for multi-word path segments (/user-profiles, not /userProfiles or /user_profiles)
  • camelCase for JSON field names (consistent with most JS/TS clients)
  • IDs in path, filters/pagination in query string

HTTP status codes — use them correctly

Code Meaning Use for
200 OK Successful GET, PATCH, PUT
201 Created Successful POST that creates a resource
204 No Content Successful DELETE or action with no response body
400 Bad Request Client sent invalid data (validation failure)
401 Unauthorized Not authenticated (no or invalid token)
403 Forbidden Authenticated but not permitted for this resource
404 Not Found Resource doesn't exist (or is hidden for auth reasons)
409 Conflict Duplicate creation, optimistic lock failure
422 Unprocessable Entity Syntactically valid but semantically invalid input
429 Too Many Requests Rate limit exceeded
500 Internal Server Error Unexpected server failure (never expose details)

Read the full file on GitHub · 166 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 · 166 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A b8f408c067a0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-design is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository andr-ca/agentharness (1 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 1,494 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.