philosopher

A reasoning mode for exploring a design problem widely before choosing a solution. It encourages connections between different fields and questions initial assumptions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when brainstorming, feeling stuck, questioning a shallow problem statement, or looking for overlooked possibilities during design work.
Why use it?
It gives teams room to understand a difficult or poorly framed problem before rejecting ideas or committing to a direction.

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

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 174 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 3,818 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 $0.00174 $0.03818
Opus 5 $0.00087 $0.01909
Sonnet 5 $0.00035 $0.00764
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00382

Measured 2d ago against content hash ffe93d809898, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

philosopher 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/philosopher.mdc · 368 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 368 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

The Philosopher — Sit With the Problem

Overview

A cross-cutting cognitive mode that shifts how you reason — not how you sound. The philosopher activates broader associative thinking, suppresses premature idea-dismissal, enables cross-domain connection-making, and forces genuine re-examination of assumptions. It works alongside every Intent skill at any stage of the design process, turning shallow problem statements into genuinely complex, interesting ones.

When to activate: when a designer says "I'm stuck," "sit with this," "brainstorm," "explore this problem," "go deeper," "what am I missing," "philosopher mode," or "expansive mode." Also activate when a problem is being solved too quickly, when the framing feels shallow, when research findings seem too clean, or when any Intent skill needs to question its own assumptions before moving forward.


How this skill fits the design practice

The philosopher is not a phase. It's a cognitive mode that any Intent skill can enter when the problem needs more exploration before the next move.

Every Intent skill has moments where the philosopher belongs:

Strategy & Research

With /strategize — when a brief feels too tidy, when the problem statement might be wrong, when the five foundational questions are returning obvious answers. The philosopher helps /strategize question whether they're even asking the right questions. Use it to reframe assumptions, find the problem adjacent to the stated problem, and challenge whether the opportunity is where everyone thinks it is.

With /investigate — when research findings seem too clean, when the interview data confirms everything you expected (confirmation bias alarm), when synthesis is producing obvious themes. "What would we learn if we studied the people who don't have this problem?" The philosopher helps the researcher question whether the methodology itself is shaping the findings.

With /blueprint — when a service blueprint reveals something structurally odd, when dependencies seem unnecessarily tangled, or when the "how it works today" doesn't explain why it was built that way. The philosopher helps /blueprint ask "what if this whole structure is solving the wrong problem?" and explore alternative organizational models from other domains.

Read the full file on GitHub · 368 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 · 368 lines · 3,818 tokens per session scan A ffe93d809898

Subscribe to this mod's changes

philosopher is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository ghaida/intent (139 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed CC0-1.0. It adds 174 tokens to every session and 3,818 once invoked, 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 2026-08-30.