token-efficiency

A set of rules for keeping coding-agent conversations and changes concise. It favors small diffs, limited context, and short explanations.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to guide how an agent reads project context, presents changes, manages long sessions, and controls task budgets.
Why use it?
It reduces wasted text and helps avoid rewriting or re-explaining information that is already available.

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/gosha70/code-copilot-team/token-efficiency
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gosha70/code-copilot-team

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 24 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 977 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 $0.00024 $0.00977
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00489
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00195
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00098

Measured yesterday against content hash 564aa5445cd2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

token-efficiency 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.

adapters/cursor/.cursor/rules/token-efficiency.mdc · 77 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 77 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Token Efficiency

Practices to minimise token waste across all sessions.

Context Management

  • Do not re-send large context blocks. Reference existing files by path instead.
  • Use /compact when context window grows large.
  • Load only relevant file sections, not entire large files.
  • One task per session where practical. Flush context between unrelated tasks.

Output Format

  • Return diffs, not full file rewrites.
  • Keep explanations concise — bullets over paragraphs.
  • Do not repeat information the user already knows.
  • Do not generate boilerplate unless asked.

File References

  • When prior context is needed, read doc_internal/CONTEXT.md (if it exists in the project) rather than re-generating from scratch.
  • For architecture context, reference doc_internal/ARCHITECTURE.md rather than re-explaining the system.

Task Budgets (Opus 4.7, public beta — API only)

An advisory token budget for the full agentic loop, not a single request. Currently public beta on Opus 4.7 via the API; not available in Claude Code or Cowork at launch.

  • Set via output_config.task_budget: {type: "tokens", total: N} in the API request.
  • Minimum total: 20,000 tokens.
  • The model sees a running countdown of the budget and self-regulates: prioritizes higher-value work first, finishes gracefully as the budget approaches zero rather than getting cut off mid-thought.
  • Advisory, not enforced. max_tokens is still the hard cap per individual request. task_budget shapes behavior across the loop; it does not stop a request from completing.

How it composes with effort:

  • effort controls depth per step (how hard Claude thinks about each turn).
  • task_budget controls breadth across the loop (how much total work Claude attempts before wrapping up).
  • Use both together for long agentic runs where you care about end-to-end token cost.

/btw — Side Questions Without Polluting Context

Opus 4.7 introduces /btw <question> for quick sidebar questions that never enter conversation history.

Read the full file on GitHub · 77 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 · 77 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A 564aa5445cd2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

token-efficiency is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository gosha70/code-copilot-team (6 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 24 tokens to every session and 977 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.