audience-analysis

audience-analysis is a cursor rule for coding agents from saif-shines/technical-writing-cursor-rules. It costs 0 tokens per session (219 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A documentation rule for identifying what readers know, what they need to learn, and what they need to accomplish.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before writing guides, specifications, or other documents so the vocabulary and content match the intended audience.
Why use it?
It prevents technical writing from assuming too much background knowledge or explaining irrelevant details.

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/saif-shines/technical-writing-cursor-rules/audience-analysis
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/saif-shines/technical-writing-cursor-rules

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for audience-analysis

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/saif-shines/technical-writing-cursor-rules/audience-analysis.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/rules/saif-shines/technical-writing-cursor-rules/audience-analysis)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/saif-shines/technical-writing-cursor-rules/audience-analysis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/saif-shines/technical-writing-cursor-rules/audience-analysis.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.
When invoked 219 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
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 $0.00000 $0.00219
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00110
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00044
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00022

Measured 4d ago against content hash 4fb7f762573d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

audience-analysis 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 4d 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.

principles/planning/audience-analysis.mdc · 32 lines

What it actually says

metadata: alwaysApply: true

Audience Analysis

Define Your Audience's Needs

Answering these questions helps determine document content:

  • Who is your target audience? (Consider roles and proximity to knowledge)
  • What is their goal? Why are they reading this?
  • What do they already know before reading?
  • What should they know or be able to do after reading?

Determine What Your Audience Needs to Learn

  • List tasks the audience needs to perform or information they need to learn.
  • Consider task order if applicable.
  • Focus on information for design specs, tasks for how-to guides.

Fit Documentation to Your Audience

  • Use empathy: Write for the audience's curiosity, not your own.
  • Match vocabulary and concepts to the audience.
  • Be mindful of proximity: Explain more as the audience widens or is less familiar.
  • Beware the "Curse of Knowledge": Explain concepts experts might take for granted.
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. 4d ago First seen · 32 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 4fb7f762573d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

audience-analysis is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository saif-shines/technical-writing-cursor-rules (7 stars, last pushed 1y ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 219 tokens. 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.