api-design

Rules for designing APIs, the interfaces through which software systems exchange requests and responses, as stable and documented contracts.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them to define request and response formats, authentication, authorization, pagination, errors, rate limits, idempotency keys, compatibility rules, and migration steps.
Why use it?
They reduce breaking changes, unclear errors, unsafe access, incompatible clients, and repeated side effects when requests are retried.

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/jterratsdev/ableton-live-mcp/api-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jterratsdev/ableton-live-mcp
Per session 296 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 296 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 $0.00296 $0.00296
Opus 5 $0.00148 $0.00148
Sonnet 5 $0.00059 $0.00059
Haiku 4.5 $0.00030 $0.00030

Measured yesterday against content hash f53c12590f31, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

api-design 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/api-design.mdc · 32 lines

What it actually says

API Design

APIs are product contracts. Design them for clarity, compatibility, safety, and operability before implementation.

Contracts

  • Define request, response, error shape, authentication, authorization, pagination, filtering, sorting, and rate limits before coding.
  • Use stable field names and explicit types. Avoid ambiguous blobs such as metadata unless the schema is documented.
  • Use consistent naming, casing, date formats, IDs, and enum values across endpoints.
  • Public API changes require examples for success, validation failure, authorization failure, and unexpected failure.

Compatibility

  • Prefer backward-compatible changes: add optional fields before removing or renaming anything.
  • Version breaking changes intentionally and document migration steps.
  • Do not leak internal models directly as API responses.
  • Keep error codes stable even when error messages improve.

Safety

  • Use idempotency keys for retryable create, payment, provisioning, email, or side-effecting operations.
  • Validate input at the boundary and return user-safe errors.
  • Enforce authorization per resource, not just per endpoint.
  • Apply rate limits and abuse protection for public or high-cost endpoints.

Testing

  • Add contract tests for request/response shape and error cases.
  • Add backward-compatibility tests when changing existing APIs.
  • Include tests for pagination, filtering, authorization, and idempotency when applicable.
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 · 32 lines · 296 tokens per session scan A f53c12590f31

Subscribe to this mod's changes

api-design is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository jterratsdev/ableton-live-mcp (0 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 296 tokens to every session, about $0.0015 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.