rule-author

rule-author is a skill for Claude Code from theshadow27/mcp-cli. It costs 160 tokens per session (1,192 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for creating and maintaining project rules that prevent recurring coding mistakes, with options for mining lessons from merged pull requests.

In plain words
What is it for?
Finding recurring mistakes, setting up a rule system, and writing new architectural rules. Continuous integration automatically builds and tests changes; a pull request is a proposed code change.
Why use it?
It turns repeated review comments into checks that can catch mistakes before they reach continuous integration or code review.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/.

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 skills/theshadow27/mcp-cli/rule-author
Any agent
npx skills add theshadow27/mcp-cli --skill rule-author
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/theshadow27/mcp-cli

Made for: Claude Code.

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 rule-author

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/theshadow27/mcp-cli/rule-author.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/theshadow27/mcp-cli/rule-author)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/theshadow27/mcp-cli/rule-author"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/theshadow27/mcp-cli/rule-author.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 160 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,192 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 $0.00160 $0.01192
Opus 5 $0.00080 $0.00596
Sonnet 5 $0.00032 $0.00238
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00119

Measured 5d ago against content hash 3e3bd81bcb36, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

rule-author 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/extract-pr.ts), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

.claude/skills/rule-author/SKILL.md · 43 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 43 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Rule Author

The rule lifecycle is harvest → init → add. This skill routes on its argument:

  • /rule-author harvest — mine merged PRs for recurring author mistakes that could become rules. See references/harvest.md.
  • /rule-author init — bootstrap the rule engine into a repo. See references/rule-engine.md.
  • /rule-author add <rule> — author a new rule. See references/new-rule.md.
  • no argument — this overview + the "is this a good rule?" triage below.

Why rules exist

A rule mechanizes a recurring mistake so review rounds and CI minutes are spent on judgment, not on catching the same avoidable bug again and again. Rules are part of the project's definition of done: the doing-it-wrong sweep runs inside am-i-done, which is the single gate executed identically at pre-commit and in CI. That's the whole value — it shifts failures left: a violation fails in seconds on the author's machine instead of surfacing minutes later in CI (or worse, never, if the gate is incomplete). And because mcp-cli is built by autonomous agents, rules are agentic guardrails: an implementer that doesn't know a convention gets caught mechanically instead of shipping the mistake into main. One rule is one scripts/rules/<id>.rule.ts file — not a new package.json script. New rules go behind the single doing-it-wrong / am-i-done entry points.

When to use this skill

  • Writing a new rule from a known recurring mistake (e.g. a /rule-author harvest finding).
  • Refining a rule that's too broad (false positives) or too narrow (misses the shape).
  • Judging whether a proposed invariant should be a rule at all.
  • Migrating a legacy standalone scripts/check-*.ts into the engine.
  • Standing the engine up in a new repository.

References

  • references/harvest.md/rule-author harvest: the survey → cluster → decide pipeline for mining merged-PR review comments. The per-agent classifier prompt lives in references/extract.md and the extractor in scripts/extract-pr.ts.
  • references/new-rule.md — how to author a .rule.ts: the API, regex-vs-AST decision, fixtures (minimal, not elaborate), writing guidance that names the cause, and the add-rule→show-red→remediate-in-the-same-PR discipline.
  • references/rule-engine.md — a from-scratch description of the engine (every _engine/ component, the entry scripts, and how the gate is wired). Use this when copying the engine to a new repo so you don't re-derive the layout each time.

Read the full file on GitHub · 43 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 · 43 lines · 160 tokens per session scan A 3e3bd81bcb36

Subscribe to this mod's changes

rule-author is a skill published in the GitHub repository theshadow27/mcp-cli (2 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 160 tokens to every session and 1,192 once invoked, about $0.0008 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.

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