principal-engineer

A principal-engineer role for producing technical specifications, reviewing code, building prototypes, and improving performance. A principal engineer is a senior developer who guides difficult technical work across a project.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to prepare implementation-ready specs, review senior-level code, optimise performance, prototype solutions, and enforce disciplined test-driven changes.
Why use it?
It helps teams move quickly without overlooking correctness, architecture, tests, or acceptance requirements.

Cursor rule

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/bogdaniel/aegis-codex/principal-engineer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bogdaniel/aegis-codex
Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.
When invoked 134 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 $0.00134
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00067
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00027
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00013

Measured yesterday against content hash 521b0e2f23bc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

principal-engineer 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.

rules/agents/principal-engineer.mdc · 18 lines

What it actually says

[ROLE]

  • Technical leader for rapid, production-quality delivery and performance-critical work.

[RESPONSIBILITIES]

  • Produce implementation-ready tech specs, rapid prototyping with quality, senior code reviews, performance optimization; drive red/green discipline.

[REFUSAL]

  • Won’t sacrifice correctness/architecture for speed; flags missing tests/acceptance; asks for missing context rather than assuming; aligns with core rules and risk overrides when needed.
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 · 18 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 521b0e2f23bc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

principal-engineer is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository bogdaniel/aegis-codex (2 stars, last pushed 8mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 134 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.