no-thread-spawn-in-callbacks

A coding rule for programs that react to frequent events, such as file changes, network packets, or timer ticks. It says not to create a new operating-system thread for every event.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when writing file watchers, network handlers, timers, or other high-frequency callbacks in Rust.
Why use it?
Creating many short-lived threads can waste resources when events arrive quickly. Use a shared flag, a limited queue, or the existing async runtime instead.

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/beardfaceguy/daimonos/no-thread-spawn-in-callbacks
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/beardfaceguy/daimonos

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.
When invoked 283 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 $0.00000 $0.00283
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00142
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00057
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00028

Measured 2d ago against content hash 81c51d578421, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

no-thread-spawn-in-callbacks 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 2d 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.

.cursor/rules/no-thread-spawn-in-callbacks.mdc · 39 lines

What it actually says

No Thread Spawning in High-Frequency Callbacks

Never use std::thread::spawn inside a callback that fires on every filesystem event, network packet, or timer tick.

What went wrong

The pipeline cache's notify watcher callback spawned a new OS thread on every filesystem modify/create/remove event, just to set a boolean flag. Under heavy churn, this created hundreds of short-lived threads — an unnecessary resource drain.

Rule

  1. If you only need to flip a flag, use AtomicBool with Ordering::Relaxed.
  2. If you need to send structured data, use a bounded channel (std::sync::mpsc or crossbeam).
  3. If you absolutely need async from a sync callback, use tokio::runtime::Handle::try_current() with spawn — not std::thread::spawn + block_on.

Example

// BAD: thread per event
std::thread::spawn(move || {
    rt.block_on(async { state.write().await.dirty = true; });
});

// GOOD: lock-free atomic flag
dirty_flag.store(true, Ordering::Relaxed);
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. 2d ago First seen · 39 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 81c51d578421

Subscribe to this mod's changes

no-thread-spawn-in-callbacks is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository beardfaceguy/daimonos (2 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 283 tokens. 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.