selectools-providers

Rules for implementing large-language-model provider adapters in selectools. An adapter connects the shared library interface to a specific model provider.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them when adding or changing a provider, supporting tool calls, implementing streaming, or maintaining fallback behavior.
Why use it?
They keep providers consistent, especially when passing tools, streaming responses, formatting messages, and handling fallbacks.

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/johnnichev/selectools/selectools-providers
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/johnnichev/selectools

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.
When invoked 493 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 $0.00493
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00246
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00099
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00049

Measured 2d ago against content hash 1b842c107d7f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

selectools-providers 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/selectools-providers.mdc · 49 lines

What it actually says

Provider Implementation Rules

Protocol Compliance

Every provider must implement all methods from providers/base.py:

  • complete(), acomplete() — sync/async completion
  • stream(), astream() — sync/async streaming
  • _format_messages() — convert Message to provider format

Critical: Tool Passing

ALL methods (complete, acomplete, stream, astream) MUST:

  • Accept tools: list[Tool] | None = None parameter
  • Forward tools to the underlying API call
  • Map tools using _map_tool_to_<provider>(t) helper

Critical: Streaming Return Types

  • stream() returns Iterable[str]
  • astream() returns AsyncIterable[Union[str, ToolCall]]
  • astream() must parse tool call chunks and yield ToolCall objects
  • Never stringify ToolCall objects

OpenAI-Specific

  • Use _uses_max_completion_tokens(model) to decide parameter name
  • GPT-5.x, o-series, GPT-4.1 need max_completion_tokens
  • Older models use max_tokens

FallbackProvider

  • astream() must include try/except with _is_retriable + circuit breaker
  • Use _record_failure() / _record_success() consistently
  • Call on_fallback callback when falling back

Message Formatting

  • Role.TOOL messages need provider-specific formatting:
    • OpenAI: {"role": "tool", "content": ..., "tool_call_id": ...}
    • Anthropic: {"role": "user", "content": [{"type": "tool_result", ...}]}
    • Gemini: {"role": "user", "parts": [{"function_response": ...}]}
    • Ollama: {"role": "tool", "content": ..., "tool_call_id": ...}

Testing

  • Use RecordingProvider to capture and assert exact args
  • Test _format_messages for TOOL role, ASSISTANT with tool_calls, images
  • Test astream() yields ToolCall objects (not just strings)
  • Test FallbackProvider failover, circuit breaker, and callback behavior
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 · 49 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 1b842c107d7f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

selectools-providers is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository johnnichev/selectools (11 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 493 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 2026-08-30.