working-memory

A set of rules for maintaining a running record of work, decisions, plans, blockers, and continuation notes.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for reading relevant memory before substantial work and recording updated plans and completion evidence afterward.
Why use it?
It reduces the chance of losing important context between turns or when work must continue later.

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/cam-douglas/agent-instructions/working-memory
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cam-douglas/agent-instructions

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 67 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 67 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 $0.00067 $0.00067
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00034
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00013
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00007

Measured yesterday against content hash 222aebf1da1f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

working-memory 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/working-memory.mdc · 7 lines

What it actually says

Read /memory/MEMORY.md on every substantive turn. Read linked memories, blockers, runbooks, plans, and decisions when relevant. After substantive work, update the active plan/state and append concise completion evidence to the current UTC-day continuation log.

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 · 7 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A 222aebf1da1f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

working-memory is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository cam-douglas/agent-instructions (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 67 tokens to every session, about $0.0003 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.