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.
npx agentmods add rules/hmj1026/dhpk/anti-rationalizationgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hmj1026/dhpkWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/rules/hmj1026/dhpk/anti-rationalization)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/hmj1026/dhpk/anti-rationalization"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/hmj1026/dhpk/anti-rationalization.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00005 | $0.01624 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00003 | $0.00812 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00001 | $0.00325 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00001 | $0.00162 |
Grade A, and why
anti-rationalization 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 67 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Anti-Rationalization Patterns
Self-talk stop-loss reference for the rationalization phrasings that precede skipping a mandatory reviewer / TDD / sentinel step. Not always-on; referenced from .cursor/dhpk/policies/execution-policy.md "Anti-rationalization" section.
Load when: feeling hesitant about skipping any one of reviewer / TDD / sentinel mandatory steps; self-reference before acting.
Why list them out
Reviewing common judgment biases that resurface across sessions, each one is accompanied by a single line of self-persuasion. This file collects the common phrasings as a self-talk stop-loss reference table.
The most dangerous moment for a rationalization phrase is the instant it genuinely feels reasonable; consulting this table can yank that system-1 impulse back into system-2 thinking.
Common phrasings → counter-arguments
| Self-persuasion phrasing | Counter-argument / fact to return to |
|---|---|
| "This change is small, no reviewer needed" | The sentinel system is designed for the cumulative risk of small changes, not large-change-only. Three-line changes have historically tripped CSRF / SQL injection / silent truncation traps. |
| "Sentinel auto-reaps, just commit first" | The reap script's 24h threshold is a safety net, not a rationalisation for skipping the reviewer. Reap firing means "the previous review was missed" — it's a trap, not a feature. |
| "Bug is obvious, skip tdd-guide and just fix" | "Obvious" is the single largest source of known bias. RED test forces the symptom into a reproducible failure, which is the only guarantee that you fix the root cause and not just the symptom. Historical record: bug fixes that skip RED have an average regression rate > 30%. |
| "Append-only exemption should apply here" | Definition: .cursor/dhpk/policies/execution-policy.md Glossary. It applies only to pure additions — any line entering an existing method body, parameter reorder, or docblock edit means it does NOT apply. Before invoking it, first check the diff is actually 100% inside "new file / new method appended to end". |
| "Commit first, write tests after" | The TDD workflow is RED → GREEN → REFACTOR, not GREEN → commit → RED. Tests written after the implementation naturally hug the implementation, not the requirement — and cannot detect "what was fixed wrong". Once committed, the psychological priority of writing those follow-up tests drops, every time. |
| "This is unique to us, we need custom logic" | Library/service evaluation is the prerequisite, not the conclusion. Before building custom, answer: (1) what existing library did you rule out and why? (2) would its edge cases matter? (3) is custom actually simpler than integrate + maintain? Can't answer all → premature. Existing solutions ship battle-hardened edge cases. |
| "I'll add logging / telemetry after it works" | "After" reliably becomes "after the first incident" — the most expensive moment to discover you're blind. Instrument as you build, the same way you test as you build; a feature that ships without telemetry turns its first prod bug into archaeology instead of a query. |
| "console.log is fine / more logs = more observability" | Unstructured output cannot be filtered, correlated, or alerted on, and volume is not signal — three queryable structured events beat three hundred prose lines. A stable event name + fields + a correlation ID costs five minutes once; reconstructing an incident from orphan log lines costs hours. |
| "We'll document / version the API later" | The types are the contract, and Hyrum's Law guarantees every observable behaviour (including undocumented quirks) becomes a dependency once anyone relies on it. Design for extension now — additive, optional fields; retrofitting a version scheme after consumers depend on the shape is a breaking change, not a later chore. |
| "I'm confident, skip the doubt step" | Confidence correlates poorly with correctness on novel problems — the moment of certainty is exactly when a blind spot hides. A bounded fresh-context doubt pass (ARTIFACT + CONTRACT, never your conclusion) is cheap now; debugging the wrong direction after commit is not. See .cursor/dhpk/policies/execution-policy.md "In-flight doubt cycle". |
| "The fresh reviewer disagreed, so I was wrong / so it's noise" | A fresh reviewer lacks your context — disagreement is information, not a verdict. Re-read the artifact against the finding and classify it (contract-misread / actionable / trade-off / noise); rubber-stamping the reviewer is the same failure as ignoring it. Zero actionable findings across 2+ substantive cycles = doubt theatre → escalate. |
| "We'll remove the dead / zombie code later" | Code is a liability, not an asset — unreachable code misleads every future reader, surfaces in every grep and impact analysis, and quietly rots. Remove it in the same change that orphaned it (your own mess); for anything with consumers, ship the migration path first, then delete. |
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.
- yesterday First seen · 67 lines · 5 tokens per session scan A 3b942ffabab5
anti-rationalization is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository hmj1026/dhpk (2 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 5 tokens to every session and 1,624 once invoked, about $0.0000 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 2026-09-05.
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