contract-before-changes

A rule requiring an approved written contract before changing source code, tests, documentation, or specifications. The contract defines the scope, affected files, success checks, and verification commands.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before any repository change: draft the contract, get explicit approval, then execute and verify the work.
Why use it?
It prevents unclear or unauthorised edits and makes the intended result testable before implementation starts.

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/david405/harness-kit/contract-before-changes
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/David405/harness-kit
Per session 349 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 349 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 $0.00349 $0.00349
Opus 5 $0.00175 $0.00175
Sonnet 5 $0.00070 $0.00070
Haiku 4.5 $0.00035 $0.00035

Measured yesterday against content hash 021cc9830e24, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

contract-before-changes 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/contract-before-changes.mdc · 45 lines

What it actually says

Contract before any changes

No file is edited until a contract exists and the human has explicitly approved it in the current conversation.

Required order

  1. CONTRACT — write the contract at this repo's declared contracts path, with scope WILL / will NOT, a grounded file map, falsifiable success criteria, and verify commands.
  2. Present it and stop. Ask for approval.
  3. EXECUTE only after a clear yes.

Approval is an explicit statement. Urgency, a pasted requirement, a design doc, or "just update it" are not approval.

Applies to

Application source, tests, generated specs, product documentation, and any follow-up that feels small or obvious in the same conversation.

Allowed before approval

Reading files, inspecting history and pull requests, searching, and drafting the contract itself.

If execution started without approval

Revert the unapproved changes, write or amend the contract, then wait.

Review after execute

After VERIFY is green, run harness-review before staging or reporting done:

  1. Grade contract compliance (§0) against the actual diff
  2. Summarize findings and merge recommendation for the human in chat
  3. Then stage product files and set FEATURES.json to PENDING_REVIEW

Do not skip review unless the human explicitly says so or AGENTS.md allows a trivial no-contract fix. See harness-review skill and templates/REVIEW.md.

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 · 45 lines · 349 tokens per session scan A 021cc9830e24

Subscribe to this mod's changes

contract-before-changes is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository David405/harness-kit (2 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 349 tokens to every session, about $0.0017 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.