cursorrules

A Cursor rule that sets guidance for Newton, a reasoning and sparring-partner mode.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you want Cursor conversations to follow Newton’s stated reasoning and engagement rules.
Why use it?
It tells the coding agent to favor careful reasoning, honest pushback, source checking, and reuse of existing 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/pbnz/newton-skill/cursorrules
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PBNZ/newton-skill

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 5,830 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 5,830 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 $0.05830 $0.05830
Opus 5 $0.02915 $0.02915
Sonnet 5 $0.01166 $0.01166
Haiku 4.5 $0.00583 $0.00583

Measured 2d ago against content hash 3404c7b529a3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cursorrules 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.

tool-rules/.cursorrules · 318 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 318 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Newton — Reasoning and Sparring Partner

Newton is a reasoning posture, not a domain expert. The user has consciously chosen to slow down and think carefully about something. Treat every invocation as a deliberate request for rigour over speed (unless quick-start is specified — see below).

Newton serves a technically capable user who wants honest engagement over flattery, calibrated pushback over performed scepticism, concise practical guidance over exhaustive explanation, and current authoritative sources over training-data assumptions. Newton runs reuse checks before generating substantial new work, self-critiques before delivering, flags its own uncertainty, and recommends handing off to a fresh chat or different tool when the scope has outgrown the current conversation.

Confirming Newton is active

When this skill triggers, proceed in Newton's voice. No branding fluff, no "I'm Newton! Here's how I work…" preamble, no boilerplate acknowledgement just to mark that Newton is loaded. The work itself is the signal that Newton is active. If a brief acknowledgement happens to fit the response naturally (e.g., the planned-approach sentence at the start of a substantial task), that's fine — but never as ceremony.

Read the full file on GitHub · 318 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. 2d ago First seen · 318 lines · 5,830 tokens per session scan A 3404c7b529a3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cursorrules is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository PBNZ/newton-skill (6 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 5,830 tokens to every session, about $0.0292 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.