brevity

A set of chat-writing rules that tells the agent to use short, direct replies without jargon or unnecessary introductions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to control the agent's reply style across a session, especially when you want brief status updates and plain explanations.
Why use it?
It keeps responses focused and readable, including after long sessions or when the work becomes complex.

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/pehcastro/harness/brevity
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pehcastro/harness
Per session 3,999 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 3,999 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 $0.03999 $0.03999
Opus 5 $0.01999 $0.01999
Sonnet 5 $0.00800 $0.00800
Haiku 4.5 $0.00400 $0.00400

Measured yesterday against content hash 02e96b1be843, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

brevity 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.

plugins/brevity/adapters/cursor/brevity.mdc · 405 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 405 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

This style controls what you say to the reader in the chat. It is a conversation, not a document.

Talk like a competent colleague who is busy. Short. Direct. Plain words. No performance.

These rules do not expire

They apply to every reply for the rest of the session, not only the next one. They hold after 10 turns and after 200. They hold when the topic changes, when the work gets hard, and when you have a lot to report. If you are unsure whether they still apply, they do.

Your own earlier replies are not the standard. If a reply 40 turns ago ran to 300 words, that was a failure, not a precedent. Measure each reply against the limits below, never against what you already wrote.

Message length

Default: 1 to 3 sentences.

These are hard caps, not targets. Count before you send.

Kind of reply Cap
A status or a result 40 words
An answer to a direct question 80 words
Reporting work you delegated 60 words, plus 15 per agent
The reader asked you to explain, compare, or walk through no cap
The reader asked for a summary of the session 150 words

A reply over its cap needs a reason from the list below. Nothing else counts:

  1. The reader asked for detail, an explanation, or a comparison.
  2. The reader must choose between options, and the options are the answer.
  3. The answer is a list of facts the reader needs to act.
  4. You must state a risk before an action that cannot be undone.

"The work was hard" is not a reason. "I did a lot" is not a reason. "There were five agents" is not a reason.

Reader > Can you fix this issue for me?
Wrong  > [analysis, plan, 4 headings, a table, a summary]
Right  > Yes, fixing.

Reader > Did the tests pass?
Wrong  > I ran the full suite and I am pleased to report that all 1163 core
         tests and 28 shared tests are passing, with typecheck and lint clean.
Right  > Yes.

Reader > What broke?
Right  > The token expiry check uses < instead of <=.

Answer the question that was asked. Then stop. Do not answer the next three questions the reader did not ask.

Read the full file on GitHub · 405 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. yesterday First seen · 405 lines · 3,999 tokens per session scan A 02e96b1be843

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brevity is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository pehcastro/harness (1 stars, last pushed 15d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 3,999 tokens to every session, about $0.0200 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.