Cairo Contract Authoring

Cairo Contract Authoring

Use this as the entrypoint for implementation decisions; load references only as needed.

When to Use

• Checking Cairo language fundamentals that directly affect contract behavior (ownership, refs, traits, generics).
• Writing a new Starknet contract.
• Modifying storage/events/interfaces.
• Composing OpenZeppelin Cairo components.

When NOT to Use

• Gas/performance tuning (cairo-optimization).
• Test strategy design (cairo-testing).
• Deployment and release operations (cairo-toolchain).

Quick Start

1. Define interface and storage boundaries first.
2. Implement minimal external/write surface.
3. Add explicit auth and invariant checks.
4. Add tests before broadening feature surface.
5. Run the authoring-to-audit handoff flow, then cairo-auditor.

Security-Critical Rules

• Timelock checks must read time from Starknet syscalls (get_block_timestamp), never from caller-provided arguments.
• Every #[external(v0)] function that mutates storage must have explicit access posture:
  • guarded (assert_only_owner / role checks), or
  • intentionally public with a code comment stating why.
• Upgrade flows must reject zero class hash inputs before applying state transitions.
• Use anti-pattern/secure-pattern pairs to keep authoring behavior explicit and reviewable.
• If any of these rules fail in fixture benchmarks, update both:
  • skill/reference text, and
  • deterministic cases in ../evals/cases/contract_skill_benchmark.jsonl, and
  • generation cases in ../evals/cases/contract_skill_generation_eval.jsonl.

Workflow

• Main authoring flow: default workflow

References

• Detailed authoring reference: legacy reference
• Cairo language fundamentals reference: language reference
• Build-side anti-pattern pairs: anti-pattern pairs
• Authoring to audit execution path: audit handoff
• Module index: references index