development-process

A required step-by-step development process for planning and building features. TDD, or test-driven development, means writing tests as part of the implementation cycle.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to analyze a change, design its architecture, split it into approved tasks, and then implement and test it in the required order.
Why use it?
It prevents coding from starting before the feature, design, task list, and approval are clear.

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/vepo/issues/development-process
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vepo/issues

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 3,938 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 3,938 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 $0.03938 $0.03938
Opus 5 $0.01969 $0.01969
Sonnet 5 $0.00788 $0.00788
Haiku 4.5 $0.00394 $0.00394

Measured yesterday against content hash 60f2a5bcfa0f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

development-process 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 yesterday.

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/development-process.mdc · 223 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 223 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Development process (mandatory)

No production or test code until phases 1–4 are complete for the current changelog entry. Template: feature/README.md. Feature analysis: change-request-analysis.mdc. Architecture design: architecture-design.mdc.

Strict phase gate

Phases are sequential and mandatory. Never skip phase 2, phase 3, or phase 4.

planned → architecture-ready → tasks-ready → approved → in-progress → done
(feature)  (architecture)      (task break)  (explicit     (TDD only)
                                            task approval)
Action Phase Allowed edits
Feature analysis, feature questions (FQn) 1 feature/*.md, docs/**, domain spec
Architecture design, architecture questions (AQn) 2 feature/*.md, docs/**, domain spec, ARCHITECTURE.md
Answer FQn or AQn in chat or feature doc 1 or 2 (still) feature/*.md, docs/**, ARCHITECTURE.md only — not src/main/**, src/test/**, src/main/webui/**
Task break (Tasks + Test coverage + Feature checklist) 3 feature/*.md
User approves task IDs 4 feature/*.md (record approval)
TDD implementation 5 src/main/**, src/test/**, src/main/webui/**, docs as needed

Open question kinds

Kind Prefix Phase Decides
Feature question FQn 1 Product scope, UX, wireframe, domain rules, user-visible behaviour
Architecture question AQn 2 Packages, layers, API shape, schema, cross-context integration, technical trade-offs

Legacy undifferentiated Qn in existing feature docs are treated as FQn until updated.

Answering open questions ≠ development approval

Forbidden: starting phase 5 because the user answered FQ1, AQ2, chose an option, said "yes"/"big-bang", or clarified scope. Those actions only update the relevant questions table (status answered, Answer column) — they do not authorize coding.

Read the full file on GitHub · 223 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. yesterday First seen · 223 lines · 3,938 tokens per session scan A 60f2a5bcfa0f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

development-process is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository vepo/issues (8 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 3,938 tokens to every session, about $0.0197 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 2026-08-31.