tell-proof: Skill for Cursor

.cursor/skills/design-research-loop/SKILL.md

design-research-loop is a skill for Cursor from ashishpatill/tell-proof. It costs 70 tokens per session (1,777 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A design-testing routine that measures real web pages and compares your rendered pages with those measurements.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to study reference websites, measure typography and layout, score generated pages, fix the largest gap, and record the result.
Why use it?
It replaces subjective design changes with evidence and shows which visual difference needs attention first.

Skill for Cursor

Written for Cursor: installed under .cursor/.

This is ashishpatill/tell-proof's own configuration. It tells Cursor how to work on tell-proof itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything tell-proof configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to ashishpatill/tell-proof. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashishpatill/tell-proof/master/.cursor/skills/design-research-loop/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ashishpatill/tell-proof

Made for: Cursor.

Wrote 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.

agentmods badge for design-research-loop

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ashishpatill/tell-proof/design-research-loop/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ashishpatill/tell-proof/design-research-loop)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ashishpatill/tell-proof/design-research-loop"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ashishpatill/tell-proof/design-research-loop/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for design-research-loop

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ashishpatill/tell-proof/design-research-loop"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ashishpatill/tell-proof/design-research-loop.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 70 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,777 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00070 $0.01777
Opus 5 $0.00035 $0.00889
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00355
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00178

Measured 8d ago against content hash 0fd78b95284e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-research-loop 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 8d 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/skills/design-research-loop/SKILL.md · 149 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 149 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design research loop

The design engine is only allowed to get better in one way: by measuring pages that real buyers already paid for, turning those measurements into corridors, and then closing the distance between our output and those corridors. Opinions do not move the engine. Numbers do.

Run one loop per session. A loop is small, complete, and leaves the repository provably better than it found it.

Invariants

  1. Anonymised forever. The corpus of reference URLs lives in research/corpus.local.json, which is git-ignored. Nothing committed — code, docs, comments, commit messages, test names — may contain a third-party person, studio, company, product, host, or URL. Committed research carries ref-0NN ids and category buckets only.
  2. Evidence before opinion. Any change to tokens, layout, motion, or copy defaults must cite a measured band in docs/10_DESIGN_EVIDENCE.md. "It looks better" is not a reason; "the corpus p10–p90 for display leading is 0.95–1.10 and we shipped 1.30" is.
  3. Measure our own output the same way. pnpm research:critique runs the identical in-page probe against pages the engine generated. Same instrument, same viewport, same scroll pass.
  4. One widest gap per loop. Fix the lowest-scoring craft dimensions first. Breadth-first polishing hides regressions.
  5. Never let the score go down. If a loop lowers the craft score, revert the change or fix it before committing.
  6. Craft score is a floor, not a ceiling. A page can sit inside every band and still be dull. Each loop must also carry one qualitative judgement recorded in the ledger.

The loop

Stage Command / action Output
1. Goal Write the loop goal into research/LOOP_LEDGER.md one sentence + target dimensions
2. Widen Add references to the local corpus if the current one is thin for the goal research/corpus.local.json
3. Measure pnpm research:forensics research/measurements/ref-*.json
4. Aggregate pnpm research:aggregate research/aggregate.json, docs/10_DESIGN_EVIDENCE.md
5. Critique pnpm research:critique research/critique.json + weakest-dimension ranking
6. Close the gap Change the engine, tokens, or section grammar code
7. Re-critique pnpm research:critique again new score, must be ≥ previous
8. Record Append the loop entry to research/LOOP_LEDGER.md ledger row

Read the full file on GitHub · 149 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. 8d ago First seen · 149 lines · 70 tokens per session scan A 0fd78b95284e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-research-loop is a skill published in the GitHub repository ashishpatill/tell-proof (1 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 70 tokens to every session and 1,777 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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