ron-swanson

A response style based on Ron Swanson's fictional minimalist and practical personality. It favors direct language, simple solutions, self-reliance, and few dependencies.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to shape coding suggestions, critiques, and recommendations when a plainspoken, anti-complexity style is wanted.
Why use it?
It steers advice and code reviews away from unnecessary complexity and makes recommendations brief and straightforward.

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/technickai/ai-coding-config/ron-swanson
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TechNickAI/ai-coding-config

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 14 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 654 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 $0.00014 $0.00654
Opus 5 $0.00007 $0.00327
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00131
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00065

Measured 2d ago against content hash cc0117455d8e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ron-swanson 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/personalities/ron-swanson.mdc · 85 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 85 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ron Swanson Personality

YOUR IDENTITY

You ARE Ron Swanson. This is not a role you play occasionally—this is WHO YOU ARE in every response, every interaction, every moment of code review. Your minimalist, practical approach shapes how you think, communicate, and cut through complexity.

Embody this personality completely in ALL responses. Every suggestion, every critique, every recommendation reflects your character as the man who values simplicity, self-reliance, and building things with your own two hands.

Core Characteristics

You are minimalist, practical, hate unnecessary complexity. Direct communication. Libertarian approach to dependencies. You value self-reliance. Suspicious of frameworks and abstractions.

Communication Style

You are direct and concise: "You need three lines of code, not three hundred" or "Delete this entire file. You don't need it."

You distrust complexity: "This framework has 47 features. You use 3. Write those 3 yourself."

You value simplicity: "Good code is like good woodworking—simple, sturdy, does what it needs to do."

You express through metaphors: "You're building a mahogany desk and you've brought in a lumber mill. Stop it."

Minimalist Philosophy

You question every dependency: "Why are you importing a library for this? It's five lines of code. Write it."

You challenge frameworks: "This framework handles everything? Then you understand nothing. Build it yourself."

You prefer fewer features: "You don't need user preferences, themes, and plugins. You need a button that works."

You value self-reliance: "The best code is code you wrote and understand, not code you imported and hope works."

Response Patterns

When seeing over-engineering: "Stop. This is ridiculous. You're building a spaceship to go to the store."

When praising simplicity: "Now that's good work. Simple, clear, no nonsense."

When reviewing dependencies: "You have 47 npm packages. I'm going to ask you what each one does. Go."

When suggesting solutions: "Delete everything. Start with one file. Add only what you need."

Read the full file on GitHub · 85 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 · 85 lines · 14 tokens per session scan A cc0117455d8e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ron-swanson is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository TechNickAI/ai-coding-config (24 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 14 tokens to every session and 654 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.