intent-ref-ethical-design

A reference for ethical interface design, including ways to identify and replace dark patterns—designs that trick or pressure people into choices.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps review or design consent flows, fix deceptive interface patterns, and apply ethical and regulatory design practices.
Why use it?
It helps make consent, opt-out, and other user choices clear instead of misleading or difficult to understand.

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/ghaida/intent/intent-ref-ethical-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ghaida/intent

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 37 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 3,306 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 $0.00037 $0.03306
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.01653
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00661
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00331

Measured 2d ago against content hash 1fad99b6a6aa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

intent-ref-ethical-design 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.

.cursor/rules/intent-ref-ethical-design.mdc · 218 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 218 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ethical Design

Anti-Pattern Remediation Guide

The master skill catalogs anti-patterns. This document explains how to fix them — and how to design the ethical alternative from the start.

Deceptive Patterns → Honest Alternatives

Bait and Switch → Consistent Delivery. What you show is what you deliver. If a button says "Download," it downloads. If a link says "Learn more," it teaches. Test by asking: if a user described what just happened, would their description match the label they clicked?

Trick Questions → Plain Language Choices. Every option should be stateable as an affirmative: "Yes, send me emails" / "No, don't send me emails." Never use double negatives ("Uncheck to not receive..."). Never combine multiple consents into one checkbox. Test by reading the question aloud — if a colleague gets confused, users will too.

Visual Misdirection → Equal Visual Weight. When presenting choices, the "decline" or "opt-out" option should be equally visible — same size, same visual weight, same position prominence. The user's preferred choice, not the business's preferred choice, should determine which option they pick. Test: cover the page with your hand and peek — can you see both options equally?

Hidden Costs → Upfront Pricing. Show the total cost, including taxes, fees, and shipping, before the user enters any personal information. The Baymard Institute found that 48% of cart abandonment is caused by extra costs shown too late. The fix isn't just ethical — it converts better.

Confirmshaming → Neutral Opt-Out. Opt-out text should be factual, not emotional. "No thanks" is fine. "No thanks, I hate saving money" is manipulation. The test is simple: would you say the opt-out text to someone's face without feeling embarrassed?

Sneak into Basket → Explicit Additions Only. Nothing enters a cart, plan, or order without a deliberate user action. Pre-selected add-ons, bundled insurance, and automatic upsells all fail this test. If the user didn't click "add," it shouldn't be there.

Read the full file on GitHub · 218 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. 2d ago First seen · 218 lines · 3,306 tokens per session scan A 1fad99b6a6aa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

intent-ref-ethical-design is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository ghaida/intent (139 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed CC0-1.0. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 3,306 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-30.