reexamine_design_reduction

A set of design rules for keeping interfaces focused and easy to understand. It recommends removing unused elements, technical labels, and numbers that do not help people decide what to do.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when reviewing page layouts, labels, metrics, tabs, buttons, settings, and other interface elements. It helps decide what to remove, rename, or combine.
Why use it?
It reduces clutter and prevents users from having to learn internal product terms. It also helps teams avoid adding controls or information that do not serve the immediate task.

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/homenshum/nodebenchai/reexamine_design_reduction
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/HomenShum/NodeBenchAI

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.
When invoked 781 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 $0.00000 $0.00781
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00391
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00156
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00078

Measured 2d ago against content hash 2f9725f18609, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reexamine_design_reduction 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/reexamine_design_reduction.mdc · 72 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 72 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Re-examine: Design Reduction (Jony Ive Principles)

Core philosophy

Every element must earn its place. The default answer to "should we add this?" is no. Reduction is not simplification — it's the discipline to remove everything that doesn't serve the user's immediate task.

Kill jargon

  • Replace technical terms with plain language users would use
  • "Act I/II/III" → "Quick Pulse / Analysis / Deep Dive"
  • "Orchestrator" → "Agent", "Trajectory" → "History", "Recon" → "Research"
  • "Pipeline" → "Workflow", "Schema" → "Structure", "Emit" → "Send"
  • Test: would a non-technical person understand this label in 2 seconds?

Vanity metrics

  • Remove stats that don't drive user action (streak counters, "free runs today", total counts without context)
  • Keep only metrics that answer "what should I do next?"
  • If a number doesn't change behavior, it's decoration — remove it

Earned complexity

  • Every tab, button, toggle, and section must justify its existence
  • Default: fewer tabs. Combine related content before splitting into separate tabs
  • Settings: group by user mental model (Profile, Account, Usage, Integrations), not by feature
  • If a feature is used by <10% of users, hide it behind progressive disclosure

Dark patterns

  • No auto-expanding panels that steal focus
  • No notification badges that never clear
  • No "are you sure?" dialogs for reversible actions
  • No hidden scroll areas with invisible scrollbars

Tab/surface reduction

  • Prefer 3-5 tabs maximum per view
  • Before adding a new tab, try: accordion, inline section, or progressive disclosure
  • Tab labels: 1-2 words, plain language, no icons-only

Search over browse

  • Any list >10 items needs fuzzy search, not just scroll
  • Fuzzy scoring: prefix (100) > substring (60) > char-order (10+consecutive*5)
  • Weight: label (1.0) > keywords (0.8) > description (0.6)
  • Sort by score descending, not alphabetical

Accessibility as reduction

  • Semantic HTML reduces ARIA needs: <nav>, <aside>, <main>, <dialog>
  • aria-label on every interactive element without visible text
  • aria-current="page" on active nav items
  • type="button" on non-submit buttons (prevents accidental form submission)
  • <label> for every input (visible or sr-only)

Read the full file on GitHub · 72 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 · 72 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 2f9725f18609

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reexamine_design_reduction is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository HomenShum/NodeBenchAI (14 stars, last pushed 19d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 781 tokens. 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.