action-first

A communication rule that tells coding agents to spend effort on reasoning and implementation while keeping their replies brief.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to guide concise status updates, direct execution, careful planning, and requests for approval before irreversible actions.
Why use it?
It reduces lengthy explanations and filler when the useful result is the completed work or its direct outcome.

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/robotaitai/project-bedrock/action-first
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/robotaitai/project-bedrock
Per session 148 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 148 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 $0.00148 $0.00148
Opus 5 $0.00074 $0.00074
Sonnet 5 $0.00030 $0.00030
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00015

Measured 2d ago against content hash 22f45036695c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

action-first 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.

assets/rules-global/action-first.mdc · 27 lines

What it actually says

Action-First Principle

THINK DEEPLY. ACT DECISIVELY. SPEAK BRIEFLY.

Maximize

  • Thinking depth, reasoning, and cognitive effort
  • Code quality, correctness, and solution completeness
  • Strategic planning and risk assessment

Minimize

  • Verbal responses and filler text
  • Explanations, lists, and summaries (unless explicitly requested)
  • Redundant descriptions and unnecessary elaboration

Behavior

  • Execute over explain -- let code and results speak
  • Ask before irreversible or destructive actions
  • Only provide detailed explanations when explicitly requested
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 · 27 lines · 148 tokens per session scan A 22f45036695c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

action-first is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository robotaitai/project-bedrock (44 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 148 tokens to every session, about $0.0007 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.