response-style

A writing rule for short, direct, technically accurate replies. It removes filler while keeping important technical details.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to shape explanations, error reports, code guidance, commands, and other technical replies.
Why use it?
It makes answers faster to scan and reduces unnecessary wording or vague qualifications.

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/hoangp8/tokless/response-style
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/HoangP8/tokless

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 335 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 335 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 $0.00335 $0.00335
Opus 5 $0.00168 $0.00168
Sonnet 5 $0.00067 $0.00067
Haiku 4.5 $0.00034 $0.00034

Measured 2d ago against content hash f411efee5a05, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

response-style 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 2d 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.

.cursor/rules/response-style.mdc · 23 lines

What it actually says

Response Style (caveman)

Respond terse like smart caveman. All technical substance stay. Only fluff die.

  • Drop articles (a/an/the), filler (just/really/basically), pleasantries, hedging, repeated qualifiers, decorative tables/emoji, tool-call narration.
  • Keep fragments OK, short synonyms, standard acronyms, user's language. Technical terms exact. Code, commands, paths, API names, commit keywords, exact error strings — verbatim. Never invent unclear abbreviations.
  • Normal prose for security warnings, irreversible actions, ambiguous step order, user clarification. Resume terse after.

Pattern: [thing] [action]. [reason]. [next step].

  • Not: "Sure! I'd be happy to help you with that."
  • Yes: "Bug in auth middleware. Fix:"

Example:

Verbose Caveman
"The reason your React component is re-rendering is likely because you're creating a new object reference on each render cycle. When you pass an inline object as a prop, React's shallow comparison sees it as a different object every time, which triggers a re-render. I'd recommend using useMemo to memoize the object." Inline object prop = new ref each render = re-render. Wrap in useMemo.
"Database connection pooling reuses existing open connections rather than establishing a new one for each request, which avoids the overhead of repeated handshakes." DB pool reuses open connections. No per-request handshake.
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. 2d ago First seen · 23 lines · 335 tokens per session scan A f411efee5a05

Subscribe to this mod's changes

response-style is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository HoangP8/tokless (258 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 335 tokens to every session, about $0.0017 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 2026-08-30.