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/liuyihey/agent-engineering/generalize-oncegit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/LiuYihey/Agent-EngineeringWhat 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 | $0.00340 | $0.00340 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00170 | $0.00170 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00068 | $0.00068 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00034 | $0.00034 |
Grade A, and why
generalize-once 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.
What it actually says
Generalize Once, Fix Completely
When the user points out one problem, treat it as a class of problems. Deliver the full fix before they have to ask again for siblings.
Infer the real ask
- What category is this? (dead code, redundant config, duplicated logic, stale docs, missing validation, ...)
- What scope does it naturally cover? (same file, same module, same pattern across repo)
- What would the user likely ask next if you only patch the single line they highlighted?
Answer those three, then fix that scope - not just the cited line.
One-pass workflow
- Search the pattern - grep / explore for the same smell elsewhere (sibling fields, parallel files, mirrored stubs, outdated docs).
- Fix source + consumers together - config, loader, API, UI, tests, docs that reference the same thing; don't leave orphans on either side.
- Close the loop - quick sanity check that nothing still references what you removed or duplicates what you consolidated.
Stop conditions
- Do not expand into unrelated refactors or features the user didn't imply.
- Do not ask "should I also fix X?" for obvious siblings in the same class - just fix them and mention what you included in the summary.
Communication
Briefly state what pattern you generalized (one sentence) and what else you fixed in the same pass, so the user sees they won't need to repeat themselves.
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 32 lines · 340 tokens per session scan A 9c11b4948aca
generalize-once is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository LiuYihey/Agent-Engineering (5 stars, last pushed 28d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 340 tokens to every session, about $0.0017 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 2026-08-31.
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