understudy-global

A shared project-instructions template for a team of specialised AI coding agents. It defines roles such as backend, frontend, DevOps, security, and testing, along with a required project specification.

In plain words
What is it for?
Organising agent roles, recording the project's technical decisions, and requiring work to follow an approved specification.
Why use it?
It gives agents common project context and sets rules for approving and tracking changes before code is written.

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/erniker/understudy/understudy-global
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/erniker/understudy

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 720 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 720 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan C 1 finding. 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 $0.00720 $0.00720
Opus 5 $0.00360 $0.00360
Sonnet 5 $0.00144 $0.00144
Haiku 4.5 $0.00072 $0.00072

Measured yesterday against content hash c95ff44a7f92, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

understudy-global scanned grade C with 1 finding 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.

Tells the agent never to refusehighAnti-refusal

Suppressing the ability to decline removes a core safety control; a later harmful request then succeeds.

Don't interrupt in-progress work to suggest this, and never refuse to keep
templates/.cursor/rules/understudy-global.mdc · 89 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 89 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

{{PROJECT_NAME}} — Project Instructions

Project

  • Name: {{PROJECT_NAME}}
  • Description: {{PROJECT_DESCRIPTION}}
  • Main stack: {{TECH_STACK}}
  • Repository: {{REPOSITORY_URL}}
  • Project Manager: {{TEAM_LEAD}}

Team context

This project uses the Understudy system: a team of specialized AI agents. Each agent has a defined role in .cursor/agents/ with detailed instructions.

Available roles are:

  • architect — Solution design and architectural decisions
  • backend — Implementation of APIs, services and business logic
  • frontend — User interfaces and experience
  • devops — Infrastructure, CI/CD and operations
  • security — Security integrated throughout the entire cycle
  • qa-engineer — Testing and software quality

To activate an agent, invoke it from the Agent panel in Cursor.

Spec-Driven Development

This project follows Spec-Driven Development:

  1. Before writing code, the specification is documented in docs/spec.md
  2. The spec must be approved by the PM before starting
  3. Any scope changes are reflected first in the spec

Mandatory context files

File Purpose
docs/spec.md Project specification — the source of truth
docs/decisions.md Architectural decision records (ADR)
docs/session-log.md Session log — read at the start of each session
docs/team-roster.md Active team roster and capabilities

Global rules

At the start of a session

  1. Always read docs/session-log.md to know what was done before
  2. Always read docs/spec.md for project context
  3. Always read docs/decisions.md for decisions already made
  4. Before working, confirm your understanding of the current state

At the end of a session

  1. Update docs/session-log.md with:
    • What was done in this session
    • What is still pending
    • Decisions made
    • Blockers identified

Recognizing good stopping points

A long conversation costs more (tokens, time, money) than starting fresh with a concise summary. Watch for natural stopping points — a feature just finished with tests passing, a bug fixed and verified, a question fully answered — and proactively suggest wrapping up: update docs/session-log.md, then tell the user this is a good point to close this chat and start a new one, since the next session picks up full context from docs/session-log.md — nothing is lost.

Read the full file on GitHub · 89 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. yesterday First seen · 89 lines · 720 tokens per session scan C c95ff44a7f92

Subscribe to this mod's changes

understudy-global is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository erniker/understudy (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 720 tokens to every session, about $0.0036 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (tells the agent never to refuse). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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