450-kubernetes

450-kubernetes is a cursor rule for Cursor from d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook. It costs 0 tokens per session (944 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of mandatory safety rules for Kubernetes workloads, controllers, and Argo CD. Kubernetes runs containerized applications, while Argo CD manages their deployment from declared configuration.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing or reviewing Kubernetes deployments, ServiceAccounts, RBAC, container security settings, image versions, resource limits, probes, and Argo CD changes.
Why use it?
It reduces security and availability risks by requiring restricted permissions, protected secrets, safer containers, resource settings, health checks, and controlled exceptions.

Cursor rule for Cursor

Written for Cursor: a Cursor rule (.mdc).

Good fit Use it when designing or reviewing Kubernetes deployments, ServiceAccounts, RBAC, container security…

Compare 6 cursor rules from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/450-kubernetes
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.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook

Made for: Cursor.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for 450-kubernetes

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/450-kubernetes.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/450-kubernetes)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/450-kubernetes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/450-kubernetes.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.
When invoked 944 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00000 $0.00944
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00472
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00189
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00094

Measured 7d ago against content hash e6fefd2450a8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

450-kubernetes 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 7d 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.

rules/450-kubernetes.mdc · 63 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 63 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Kubernetes Engineering Gates

This rule owns mandatory policy only. Use the Kubernetes containers skill (${HANDBOOK_ROOT}/skills/kubernetes-containers/SKILL.md) for procedures, examples, troubleshooting, Helm, EKS, Podtrace, and Argo CD workflows.

Workload Security

  • Use least-privilege ServiceAccounts and RBAC. Do not grant wildcard verbs or resources without a documented, narrow justification.
  • Do not commit plaintext credentials, tokens, private keys, or rendered Secret values. Use an approved secret delivery mechanism.
  • Default to the Restricted Pod Security Standard: run as non-root, disallow privilege escalation, use a read-only root filesystem when compatible, drop capabilities, and configure seccomp.
  • Treat privileged containers, host namespaces, host paths, broad Linux capabilities, and control-plane access as explicit exceptions with an owner, expiry, compensating controls, and review.
  • Pin deployable images by immutable digest for production. Mutable tags are not release identity.
  • Define resource requests and limits from measured behavior. Add meaningful startup, readiness, and liveness probes where the workload lifecycle requires them.

Availability and Ownership

  • Selectors, labels, ports, namespaces, and ownership boundaries MUST agree across workloads, Services, policies, autoscalers, and disruption budgets.
  • Stateful resources require an explicit persistence, backup, restore, retention, and deletion policy.
  • NetworkPolicy must default-deny where the platform supports it, then allow only required ingress and egress.
  • Changes to shared cluster-scoped resources require ownership review before application.

Controllers and API Concurrency

  • Reconcile desired state idempotently and use context-aware clients with bounded timeouts.
  • For an expected stale resourceVersion conflict, re-read current state and use a bounded retry or requeue. Do not retry blindly.
  • Repeated conflicts require diagnosis of field ownership, update scope, and competing reconcilers; prefer narrow patches or Server-Side Apply with an explicit field manager where appropriate.
  • Emit metrics for conflict rate, reconcile errors, retries, and latency. Persistent conflict is an operational defect even when bounded retries succeed.
  • CRD schema, status conditions, finalizers, conversion, defaulting, and deletion behavior must be documented and tested before release.

Read the full file on GitHub · 63 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. 7d ago First seen · 63 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A e6fefd2450a8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

450-kubernetes is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook (16 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 944 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 2026-08-30.