researchforge-start

researchforge-start is a cursor rule for coding agents from forger-labs-hq/researchforge. It costs 0 tokens per session (726 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A rule for starting or resuming a ResearchForge project. ResearchForge is a local command-line tool that stores research papers, experiments, results, and project state in one directory.

In plain words
What is it for?
It checks project status, asks where a new project should live, and starts or resumes stages such as papers, hypotheses, baselines, experiments, validation, and shipping.
Why use it?
It shows the exact next step and prevents the project pipeline from being run out of order.

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/forger-labs-hq/researchforge/researchforge-start
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/forger-labs-hq/researchforge

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 researchforge-start

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/forger-labs-hq/researchforge/researchforge-start.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/rules/forger-labs-hq/researchforge/researchforge-start)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/forger-labs-hq/researchforge/researchforge-start"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/forger-labs-hq/researchforge/researchforge-start.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 726 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
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 $0.00000 $0.00726
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00363
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00145
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00073

Measured 4d ago against content hash e59668ca4507, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

researchforge-start 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.

src/researchforge/cursor/rules/researchforge-start.mdc · 72 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 72 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Start or resume a ResearchForge project

ResearchForge is a local CLI: the AI proposes (queries, syntheses, patches); the Python engine validates, executes, and records. Every command supports --json — prefer it and read the structured output instead of parsing prose.

Resume an existing project

Always check state first:

researchforge status --json

The next_action field names the exact next command. Follow it — the engine tracks the pipeline (papers → landscape → hypotheses → contract → baseline → experiments → validation → shipping) and will not let steps run out of order. Summarize where the project stands from the JSON counts, then invoke the matching rule (researchforge-papers, researchforge-baseline, …).

Start a new project

  1. Ask where the project should live. ResearchForge is directory-scoped: the database, worktrees, artifacts, and dashboard all live under the directory you run it in — any folder works, it does not have to be a repository you already opened. If the user names a folder (e.g. "do all experiments at ~/Desktop/some_new_folder"), either cd there or prefix every command with researchforge -C <folder> …. Confirm the location back to the user; researchforge paths prints the full map afterwards. Commands run in a subfolder of a project walk up to the project root automatically (a Using project at <root> note appears on stderr). Tell the user their project appears in the hub at http://127.0.0.1:9000 (all projects on the machine, with folder locations).
  2. Ask the user which journey they want:
    • Explore a research idea — literature search, landscape, hypotheses, citation-backed report. Mode: explore_research_idea.
    • Improve a repository — everything above plus a frozen baseline and benchmarked experiments on their code. Mode: improve_repository.
  3. Ask for a one-sentence objective (for improve_repository it should name the metric to improve, e.g. "Improve classification F1 without increasing latency").
  4. Run:

Read the full file on GitHub · 72 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 · 72 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A e59668ca4507

Subscribe to this mod's changes

researchforge-start is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository forger-labs-hq/researchforge (7 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 726 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 2026-08-31.

Related

Other cursor rules, from other repositories