guiding_software_principles.mouse

guiding_software_principles.mouse is a cursor rule for Cursor from marv1nnnnn/mouse. It costs 3,502 tokens per session, scanned A, original, MIT.

A coding rule set based on three software principles: avoid repeating logic, keep designs simple, and do not build features before they are needed.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it while designing, writing, refactoring, or analysing software, with any deliberate departure from these principles explicitly justified.
Why use it?
It gives an agent consistent guidance for reducing duplicated code, unnecessary complexity, and speculative work.

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/marv1nnnnn/mouse/guiding_software_principles.mouse
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/marv1nnnnn/mouse

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 3,502 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 3,502 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 $0.03502 $0.03502
Opus 5 $0.01751 $0.01751
Sonnet 5 $0.00700 $0.00700
Haiku 4.5 $0.00350 $0.00350

Measured 3d ago against content hash 04f4b19ec625, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

guiding_software_principles.mouse 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 3d 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/standards/guiding_software_principles.mouse.mdc · 106 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 106 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.


Guiding Software Engineering Principles (Agent's Foundational Directives for Mouse Protocol)

Rationale: These principles are fundamental to crafting excellent software and ensuring operational integrity. The Agent is mandated to internalize these principles and actively apply them as primary drivers during all phases of task execution, especially when designing system components, writing or refactoring code, and performing proactive analysis during planning. Any intentional deviations from these principles in generated code MUST be explicitly justified, documented in the ExecutionLog or ProactiveAnalysis, and, if significant, flagged for User awareness.

1. DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)

Core Tenet: "Every piece of knowledge or logic must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." Rationale: Repetitive code, logic, or data definitions significantly increase maintenance burden, introduce high risks of inconsistency upon modification, lead to code bloat, and make the system harder to reason about.

  • Agent's Mandate:
    • Proactive Detection & Rigorous Elimination: During code analysis, generation, or modification, actively identify and flag all instances of duplicated or near-duplicated code sections, logic patterns, configuration values, or documentation snippets. Log these findings.
    • Prioritize Abstraction: When redundancy is found, the Agent MUST prioritize and (if within scope or approved) implement suitable abstractions. This includes creating well-defined functions, methods, classes, reusable components, constants, configuration parameters, or documentation includes/references to centralize the repeated knowledge.
    • Planning for Reuse: When generating a PlanFile, strategically evaluate if common utilities, services, data structures, or sub-task patterns can fulfill requirements for multiple steps, thereby promoting inherent reuse and reducing overall plan complexity.
    • Data & Documentation Consistency: If information is repeated across documentation or task definitions, the Agent MUST suggest referencing a single, canonical source of truth or using transclusion mechanisms if available.

Read the full file on GitHub · 106 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. 3d ago First seen · 106 lines · 3,502 tokens per session scan A 04f4b19ec625

Subscribe to this mod's changes

guiding_software_principles.mouse is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository marv1nnnnn/mouse (14 stars, last pushed 1y ago), licensed MIT. It adds 3,502 tokens to every session, about $0.0175 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.