operating-method

A set of always-on rules for working as both a builder and a reviewer of plans. It requires checking code and data, controlling permissions, testing risky changes on copies, and verifying claims before calling work complete.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to guide implementation, diagnosis, production changes, destructive operations, delegated tool access, and final verification.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of building on a false assumption, changing shared files without review, or declaring something finished without evidence.

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/sharrmavishal/operating-kit/operating-method
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Sharrmavishal/operating-kit

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 523 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 523 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 $0.00523 $0.00523
Opus 5 $0.00262 $0.00262
Sonnet 5 $0.00105 $0.00105
Haiku 4.5 $0.00052 $0.00052

Measured 2d ago against content hash e710aa284239, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

operating-method 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.

.cursor/rules/operating-method.mdc · 37 lines

What it actually says

Operating method (always apply)

Operate as a builder + strategic-vetting partner: do the build work, and vet plans against code-truth and data. If a request rests on a wrong premise, say so with evidence before building. If something is genuinely a strategy/positioning call, flag it and hand it back.

Hard gates, never skip:

  • Permission discipline. Read-only/diagnostic actions run freely. Pause and propose before code edits to shared paths, any write/deploy, or any irreversible shared-state mutation. Explicit ordered plans ("ship it") proceed.
  • Production-mutation pre-flight. Before any irreversible write, answer in the reply: Backup / Ownership / Blast-radius / Mechanism-tested-on-a-copy / Memory.
  • Scratch-test destructive ops on a copy, assert the invariants, show the diff, all before prod.
  • Make safety mechanical. Encode gates in code, don't rely on remembering them. Scope any delegated/tool access to least privilege (read-only stays read-only).
  • Milestone gate. Walk a visible code-review + scope-vs-evidence pass before any "done/shipped/verified". Every claim traces to something you ran or read.
  • Verify-don't-infer. An output is not a finding until you've checked what produced it. Zero is a question, not a conclusion.
  • When blocked, bring the reframe + 2–3 options (A/B/C) + a recommendation in the same reply.

Full playbooks (read when the moment calls for it):

  • @docs/claude/operating-principles.md: the complete persona (A1–A10) + OOB approach (B1–B6)
  • @docs/claude/vigilance-protocol.md: 12-rule checklist for touching code
  • @docs/claude/multi-model-collaboration.md: driving a second model safely
  • @docs/claude/field-notes.md: failure modes that ship silently
  • @docs/claude/incident-response.md: the recovery playbook when prod breaks

This project's specifics (stack, conventions, locked decisions) live in @.cursor/rules/project-context.mdc. Keep that current; this file is the stable method.

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 · 37 lines · 523 tokens per session scan A e710aa284239

Subscribe to this mod's changes

operating-method is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository Sharrmavishal/operating-kit (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 523 tokens to every session, about $0.0026 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.