431-api-design-guidelines

A set of rules for designing consistent service interfaces, especially web APIs. An API is a defined way for software systems to communicate.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps design versioned API routes, paginated results, structured error responses, and OpenAPI or Swagger documentation kept in sync with the code.
Why use it?
It makes endpoints easier to use and maintain by standardizing versions, pagination, errors, and documentation.

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/hamzaamjad/cursor-rules/431-api-design-guidelines
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hamzaamjad/cursor-rules
Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.
When invoked 118 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 $0.00118
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00059
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00024
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00012

Measured yesterday against content hash d604443de4a4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

431-api-design-guidelines 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/400-patterns/431-api-design-guidelines.mdc · 15 lines

What it actually says

api-design-guidelines

Purpose: Standardize service interfaces for consistency and usability.

  • Version your API in the URL or headers (e.g. /v1/users).
  • Use consistent pagination (limit/offset or cursors).
  • Return structured error responses with codes and human messages.
  • Document endpoints in OpenAPI/Swagger; keep docs in sync with code.
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 · 15 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A d604443de4a4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

431-api-design-guidelines is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository hamzaamjad/cursor-rules (2 stars, last pushed 1y ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 118 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.