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