testing-style

Rules for placing, naming, mocking, and asserting in tests. Tests are small programs that check whether other code behaves as expected.

In plain words
What is it for?
Choosing test file locations, naming test cases, creating stateful fake services, mocking project hooks, defining shared fixtures, and using clear variable names.
Why use it?
It keeps tests consistent with the surrounding project and avoids misleading names, unsuitable mocks, and hard-to-maintain fixtures. It also explains when to use fake services versus module mocks.

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/tonyghiani/ai-essentials/testing-style
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tonyghiani/ai-essentials
Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.
When invoked 485 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 $0.00485
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00243
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00097
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00049

Measured 2d ago against content hash 635c757bdd06, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

testing-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 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.

rules/testing-style.mdc · 55 lines

What it actually says

Project conventions win. Read the neighbouring tests first.

Placement

tests/checklist_card.test.tsx ✅ checklist_card.tsx + checklist_card.test.tsx Colocated beside the source. No __tests__ directories.

describe('<ExportedSymbol>') at the top level, one nested describe per method or option group.

Naming

❌ it('should throw a 409 error when the state blocks activity') ✅ it('throws a 409 error in a state that blocks activity') Declarative third person. No "should".

Mocking

✅ const makeService = (state: TMaintenanceState) => ({ getState: jest.fn(async () => state) } as unknown as IMaintenanceService); Services and anything stateful get a hand-rolled fake that round-trips state: a client that throws NotFound until create, an API that tracks enabled so pause then resume behaves. Cast at the seam with as unknown as T, and JSDoc each option field.

✅ jest.mock('../../hooks/use_kibana', () => ({ useKibana: () => stub })); jest.mock is for module-mocking your own hooks in component tests. Not for services.

✅ const REQUEST = {} as IRequest; Shared fixtures are SCREAMING_SNAKE module constants.

Variables get full names here too: rulesClient, not rc.

Assertions

❌ expect(result).toMatchSnapshot(); ✅ await expect(assertNotPaused({ service, request: REQUEST })).rejects.toMatchObject({ statusCode: 409 }); ✅ expect(service.getStatus).not.toHaveBeenCalled(); Concrete values, or expect.objectContaining. Snapshots only where a tool generates them. Negative assertions pin what must not happen, such as proving a guard took the cheap read.

What to test

Edge cases and contracts first; the happy path only as their setup. Idempotency, retry after partial failure, a missing dependency, out-of-band state change, inverted ranges, and the exact boundary (299ms, then 300ms).

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 · 55 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 635c757bdd06

Subscribe to this mod's changes

testing-style is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository tonyghiani/ai-essentials (6 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 485 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.