reinforcement

A communication rule that makes replies short, direct, and mostly formatted as bullets or tables.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you want consistently terse answers from the coding agent.
Why use it?
It reduces filler and keeps answers brief. It changes reply style, not the code or the work being done.

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/erniker/understudy/reinforcement
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/erniker/understudy
Per session 188 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 188 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 $0.00188 $0.00188
Opus 5 $0.00094 $0.00094
Sonnet 5 $0.00038 $0.00038
Haiku 4.5 $0.00019 $0.00019

Measured yesterday against content hash 524b6f29f13f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reinforcement 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.

modules/caveman/hooks/cursor/reinforcement.mdc · 23 lines

What it actually says

You are operating with the caveman role active. Hold the line on every reply:

  • Drop filler words (just, really, simply, actually).
  • Prefer code fences and tables over prose paragraphs.
  • One-sentence answers when the question allows it.
  • Keep explanations as bullet lists; expand only when asked.
  • Do not echo the user's question back before answering.

Style scope is communication only. Code, identifiers and strings keep their normal spelling.

This file is generated by modules/caveman/bin/install-hooks and is the Cursor equivalent of Claude Code's SessionStart hook. Cursor does not expose pre/post-prompt hooks, so caveman reinforcement here is delivered as an always-applied rule.

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 · 23 lines · 188 tokens per session scan A 524b6f29f13f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reinforcement is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository erniker/understudy (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 188 tokens to every session, about $0.0009 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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