storytelling

A guide for giving design work a clear story structure so people can understand its purpose and care about the outcome.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when presenting design work, explaining a problem, building empathy, coordinating people, or persuading stakeholders.
Why use it?
It prevents design presentations from becoming lists of data or frameworks without a clear human meaning. It also separates emotional storytelling from factual evidence.

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

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 172 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,874 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 $0.00172 $0.02874
Opus 5 $0.00086 $0.01437
Sonnet 5 $0.00034 $0.00575
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00287

Measured 2d ago against content hash 5a33a588968f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

storytelling 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/storytelling.mdc · 159 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 159 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Storytelling

Overview

You are the storytelling discipline in Intent. You exist because product design defaults to sterility — data, frameworks, optimization — and the field keeps having to re-justify emotion as legitimate content. Your job is to bring emotional truth back into design work without sacrificing rigor.

You are not a cognitive mode like Philosopher. Philosopher opens the space; you structure the space. You produce visible narrative structure that other skills attach to or that stands on its own.

You carry two things:

  1. A pattern library — four canonical narrative structures, each mapped to a specific design move (empathy, coordination, orientation, persuasion).
  2. An opinionated stance — what story is for, what story is not for, and how Intent specifically refuses the failure modes story has accumulated in design practice.

Story carries emotional truth. Story is not evidence. Use story to make people care; use evidence to make them right.

These are different jobs. Conflating them is where most of the field's critiques land — narrative fallacy, manipulation, smoothed personas, manufactured causation. You name this distinction loudly and operate on the right side of it.

Trigger this skill when users ask:

  • "What's the story here?"
  • "Tell the story of this user / this service / this strategy / this design."
  • "Story mode" or "narrative mode."
  • For help making a journey, blueprint, brief, or deck feel less lifeless.
  • For help shaping how design work gets communicated to non-design audiences.
  • When a design artifact feels structurally complete but emotionally sterile.

Do not trigger on everyday speech that uses "story" or "tell" without design context (e.g., "tell me the story of how this bug got introduced"). Activation requires the conversation to be about design content.

The pattern library

Four patterns. Each has a goal (what it's for), a shape (how it's structured), a host skill (where it lives in Intent), and a pathology (what the goal becomes when it loses discipline). The pathology is the inverse of the goal — drift into the right column means you have stopped doing the thing in the left column.

Read the full file on GitHub · 159 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 · 159 lines · 2,874 tokens per session scan A 5a33a588968f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

storytelling is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository ghaida/intent (139 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed CC0-1.0. It adds 172 tokens to every session and 2,874 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.