technical-writing-style

technical-writing-style is a cursor rule for coding agents from saif-shines/technical-writing-cursor-rules. It costs 0 tokens per session (741 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of rules for writing technical documentation in Markdown or MDX, a Markdown format that supports components. It covers sentence style, structure, headings, and code examples.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating or reviewing documentation for software engineers, technical product managers, or scientists.
Why use it?
It gives writers consistent limits and requirements for producing clear, active, testable technical content.

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/technical-writing-style
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 technical-writing-style

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/saif-shines/technical-writing-cursor-rules/technical-writing-style.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/rules/saif-shines/technical-writing-cursor-rules/technical-writing-style)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/saif-shines/technical-writing-cursor-rules/technical-writing-style"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/saif-shines/technical-writing-cursor-rules/technical-writing-style.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 741 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 5.1 $0.00000 $0.00741
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00370
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00148
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00074

Measured 5d ago against content hash 32ed30354ba2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

technical-writing-style 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 5d 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/style/technical-writing-style.mdc · 127 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 127 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Technical Writing Rules for MD/MDX Files

metadata: alwaysApply: true

Technical Writing Rules for MD/MDX Files

Technical Writing Rules for MD/MDX Files

Technical Writing Rules for MD/MDX Files

rules: voice_and_style: active_voice: enabled: true exceptions: ["imperative_commands"] note: "Passive constructions require explicit approval" strong_verbs: forbidden: ["is", "are", "was", "were", "occur", "happen"] replacements: "is provided by": "provides" "was generated": "generated" clarity: max_sentence_length: 25 banished_phrases: ["there is", "there are"] examples: bad: "There are three components" good: "The system contains three components"

document_structure: mandatory_sections: - scope: required: true max_length: 1 - audience: roles: ["software_engineers", "technical_pms", "scientists"] prerequisites: ["matrix_multiplication", "backpropagation"] - summary: position: header length: "3-5_lines" heading_rules: levels: [2, 3] task_based: true forbidden_words: ["Miscellaneous", "Various"]

code_samples: requirements: testable: true production_ready: true security_scan: basic formatting: language_spec: required highlighting: selective bold_emphasis: ["critical_sections"] comments: density: "1_per_10_lines" content: "why > what" forbidden: ["obvious_operations"]

lists_tables: list_rules: max_items: 7 parallelism: strict introduction: "complete_sentence:" table_rules: header_requirements: descriptive: true technical_terms: explained cell_constraints: max_length: 120 markdown: forbidden

cultural_requirements: neutrality: forbidden: - sports_analogies - region_specific_idioms examples: bad: "Home run implementation" good: "Successful implementation" vocabulary: complexity: flesch_kincaid_8 banned_words: - sesquipedalian - obtuse - kosher translation_ready: true

Read the full file on GitHub · 127 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. 5d ago First seen · 127 lines · 741 tokens per session scan A 32ed30354ba2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

technical-writing-style 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 741 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.