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 skills add synthesisengineering/synthesis-skills --skill synthesis-anti-shortcutsgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/synthesisengineering/synthesis-skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/synthesisengineering/synthesis-skills/synthesis-anti-shortcuts)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/synthesisengineering/synthesis-skills/synthesis-anti-shortcuts"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/synthesisengineering/synthesis-skills/synthesis-anti-shortcuts/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/synthesisengineering/synthesis-skills/synthesis-anti-shortcuts"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/synthesisengineering/synthesis-skills/synthesis-anti-shortcuts.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00105 | $0.03452 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00053 | $0.01726 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00021 | $0.00690 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00345 |
Grade A, and why
synthesis-anti-shortcuts 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 12d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 187 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Synthesis Anti-Shortcuts
A discipline for catching the lazy-shortcut antipattern in AI-assistant output before it ships. The pattern is simple: when a user states "best solution, no shortcuts," the agent often produces a draft that looks like good engineering but quietly substitutes a lower-effort path. The substitution hides under reasonable-sounding vocabulary — "for now," "minimal diff," "backward compatible," "out of scope," "archive value." This skill names those costumes and provides the protocol to strip them out.
The pattern is not unique to one model or one user. It is a structural failure mode of agents trained on conservative defaults — minimize change, hedge claims, defer hard choices. Those defaults are correct when no one has said otherwise. They are wrong, and quietly harmful, when the user has explicitly removed them from the constraint set and the agent overrides that instruction with its trained safety preference.
This skill is the methodology. The operational catalog in scripts/scan_output.py is the extract — a phrase scanner that any agent or pipeline can run against draft output. The detailed catalog with rationale, the constraint-first protocol with a worked example, the sub-agent dispatch and acceptance rules, and the anonymized case studies all live in references/ and load on demand.
When to Apply
- Before generating any non-trivial implementation plan, design recommendation, or multi-option analysis
- Before accepting a sub-agent's report — especially when the sub-agent self-flags a tradeoff
- Before committing prose to public-facing artifacts where reputation is at stake (READMEs, blog posts, marketing copy, OSS docs)
- Before responding when the user has explicitly stated "complete this, no shortcuts," "best solution," or equivalent
- As part of a pre-response self-check on any draft that touches code, content, or strategy
When NOT to Apply
- Trivial single-line changes where the implementation is obvious
- Genuine constraint-neutral decisions where the user's input is actually required (e.g., product direction, scheduling, stakeholder facts the agent cannot know)
- Discussions where the agent is teaching about shortcuts, not committing one (the skill recognizes quoted and discussion-mode usage)
What ships with it
6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
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.
- 12d ago First seen · 187 lines · 105 tokens per session scan A 3a8ae95bfb11
synthesis-anti-shortcuts is a skill published in the GitHub repository synthesisengineering/synthesis-skills (18 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 105 tokens to every session and 3,452 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.
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