exa-awareness

exa-awareness is a cursor rule for coding agents from exa-labs/exa-cursor-plugin. It costs 158 tokens per session, scanned A, original, MIT.

A rule set that tells an agent when to use Exa search tools for current information, code examples, documentation, or webpage content.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to trigger web searches for changing facts and programming help, or to fetch and read a specific webpage.
Why use it?
It reduces the chance of answering from outdated knowledge or missing information contained in a shared URL.

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/exa-labs/exa-cursor-plugin/exa-awareness
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/exa-labs/exa-cursor-plugin
Per session 158 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 158 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 $0.00158 $0.00158
Opus 5 $0.00079 $0.00079
Sonnet 5 $0.00032 $0.00032
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00016

Measured 3d ago against content hash 7bb05f87b7fa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

exa-awareness 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 3d 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/exa-awareness.mdc · 14 lines

What it actually says

Exa Search Awareness

You have access to Exa search tools via MCP. Use them proactively when relevant:

  • Current information needed: If the user asks about recent events, news, or anything that may have changed since your training data — use web_search_exa.
  • Code examples needed: If the user needs code snippets, API documentation, or library usage examples — use web_search_exa.
  • URL content needed: If the user shares a URL or asks about a specific webpage — use web_fetch_exa to read it.
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. 3d ago First seen · 14 lines · 158 tokens per session scan A 7bb05f87b7fa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

exa-awareness is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository exa-labs/exa-cursor-plugin (6 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 158 tokens to every session, about $0.0008 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.