481-databricks

481-databricks is a cursor rule for Cursor from d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook. It costs 32 tokens per session (2,972 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of engineering rules for Databricks, a platform for data pipelines, analytics, machine learning, and governed data storage.

In plain words
What is it for?
It guides Spark jobs, Delta tables, notebooks, Lakeflow pipelines, Unity Catalog permissions, and deployment bundles.
Why use it?
It helps keep data layers organized, access controlled, pipelines reliable, and production systems maintainable.

Cursor rule for Cursor

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

Good fit It guides Spark jobs, Delta tables, notebooks, Lakeflow pipelines, Unity Catalog permissions, and deployment bundles.

Compare 6 cursor rules from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/481-databricks
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 481-databricks

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/481-databricks.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/481-databricks)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/481-databricks"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook/481-databricks.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 32 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,972 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 $0.00032 $0.02972
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.01486
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00594
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00297

Measured 4d ago against content hash 5ca678b540fc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

481-databricks 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 4d 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/481-databricks.mdc · 333 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 333 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Databricks Engineering Ruleset

Audience: engineers building Databricks jobs, notebooks, Lakeflow pipelines, SQL warehouses, Delta Lake tables, and governed AI/data workloads

Goal: reliable pipelines with predictable performance, governed access, and safe maintenance

[!IMPORTANT] Default to a Lakehouse mental model: bronze/silver/gold (or raw/curated/serving), with explicit contracts between layers.

[!NOTE] Current Databricks terminology: Lakeflow Spark Declarative Pipelines is the current product name for what was formerly Delta Live Tables (DLT). Existing dlt code still works, but new examples should prefer from pyspark import pipelines as dp. Declarative Automation Bundles is the current name for what was formerly Databricks Asset Bundles (DABs).


Non-negotiables

NN-1: Unity Catalog is required for production

Production data and AI assets use Unity Catalog. Hive metastore is a legacy migration source only.

Reject in review:

  • USE CATALOG hive_metastore in production code
  • persistent data under DBFS mounts (dbfs:/mnt/...) instead of Unity Catalog volumes / external locations
  • grants to account users or individual owners for production data
  • tables, volumes, functions, or models without group/service-principal ownership

NN-2: Standard access mode by default; Dedicated only by exception

Use Standard access mode for most Unity Catalog workloads. Use Dedicated only for workloads that need capabilities Standard does not support (for example some ML/GPU/R/RDD patterns), and document the reason.

Reject in review:

  • No-isolation shared compute for governed production workloads
  • legacy credential passthrough in Unity Catalog workspaces
  • interactive all-purpose clusters running scheduled production jobs

NN-3: Declarative Automation Bundles for deployable projects

Use Declarative Automation Bundles (formerly Databricks Asset Bundles) for jobs, Lakeflow pipelines, notebooks, and deployment metadata that must move across environments. Terraform still owns account/workspace infrastructure; bundles own deployable Databricks project resources.

Read the full file on GitHub · 333 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. 4d ago First seen · 333 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A 5ca678b540fc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

481-databricks is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository d-padmanabhan/agent-engineering-handbook (16 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 2,972 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 2026-09-03.