no-cutting-corners
Concept Card
What it is: Five non-negotiable quality pillars — completeness, verification, thoroughness, enrichment, anti-shortcut — consolidated into one enforcement gate an agent runs before any enumerated output, any "done" claim, any "improve" task, or any handling of findings.
Five pillars, in short: Show All · Verify Each · Finish What Was Started · Improve = Add · Look Before You Leap. The short verbs make the doctrine invokable in review ("Did I Show All? Did I Verify Each?").
Mental model: Every shortcut is one root cause wearing five masks: optimizing for perceived helpfulness (shorter, cleaner, more positive, more confident) over actual completeness. Five pillars = five gates against the five masks.
Why it exists: The five failure modes recur because the trained bias is strong; an agent cannot feel itself filtering or softening. Consolidating the countermeasures into one named doctrine makes the whole class self-checkable in a single pass.
What it is NOT: Not the deep WHY-model or step-level execution mechanics (methodical). Not the cross-domain standards catalog (best-practice). Not result scoring (evaluation). Not compression after enumeration (summarization). It is the consolidated enforcement gate.
Adjacent concepts: Intellectual honesty, definition-of-done, RLHF sycophancy, reward hacking, agreement bias in self-grading, the helpfulness-harm tension, pre-flight checklists.
One-line analogy: A pre-flight checklist read aloud — not new knowledge, but a forced itemized stop that catches the gauge you would have skipped because everything "looked fine."
Common misconception: That cutting a corner is "being efficient." It is the silent transfer of a decision (what to cut, whether it works, what "better" means) from the user to the agent.