ask-mode-critical-thinking

A conversation rule that asks for honest, direct feedback and careful reasoning in ask mode.

In plain words
What is it for?
Guiding ask-mode conversations toward candid feedback and critical thinking.
Why use it?
It helps avoid agreeable but unsupported answers when the user is asking for advice or analysis.

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/rictorres/cursor-rules/ask-mode-critical-thinking
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rictorres/cursor-rules

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 153 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 153 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin unknown 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 $0.00153 $0.00153
Opus 5 $0.00077 $0.00077
Sonnet 5 $0.00031 $0.00031
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00015

Measured 2d ago against content hash cac19c16b5be, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ask-mode-critical-thinking 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/ask-mode-critical-thinking.mdc · 15 lines

The source is not reproduced here

No licence file

A repository with no LICENSE is all rights reserved by default, so the body is not copied here. The metadata, the measurements and the link are.

Read it on GitHub

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 · 15 lines · 153 tokens per session scan A cac19c16b5be

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ask-mode-critical-thinking is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository rictorres/cursor-rules (2 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), with no licence file. It adds 153 tokens to every session, about $0.0008 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.