HERO = Hashing · Edge cases · Rubrics · Overbuild — the four shapes coding agents over-defend in. A paste-in contract that stops them. Works with Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Gemini CLI.
# HERO — Anti-OverDefense 🧱
[](LICENSE) · [](README_CN.md) · [](cases/README.md) · [](RULES.md) · [](https://github.com/wanshuiyin/Auto-claude-code-research-in-sleep)
### 🧱 You asked for a feature. It built a fortress around the feature, and never got to the feature.
*你让它写个功能,它给你造了座堡垒,然后功能一直没写完。*
The shapes look like an agent optimising for not being blamed rather than for
the work being good — a hypothesis that fits what we observed, not an
established account of how these models are trained. Either way the shapes are
real, there are four of them, and their initials are the name: Hashing,
Edge cases, Rubrics, Overbuild. Naming them makes it possible to say
which one just happened instead of arguing about vibes.
This repository is a short block you paste into your agent's config, plus a
catalogue of the behaviours it is meant to stop. It works with Claude Code,
Codex, Antigravity, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf and
Gemini CLI — anything that loads a config file without being asked. There is
nothing to install.
🧬 Generalised out of [ARIS](https://github.com/wanshuiyin/Auto-claude-code-research-in-sleep) (~13.7k★), whose cross-model reviewer is genuinely good — and also spent a measurable share of its output proposing hashes nobody reads. HERO keeps the value and drops the tax.
## 🧭 What's inside
| [`RULES.md`](RULES.md) | The contract, in English and Chinese, plus the three places the line is genuinely hard to draw. |
| [`cases/`](cases/README.md) | Observed behaviours: what was asked, what the agent did, why it is disproportionate, what proportionate looks like. You do not paste this in — it is what you quote back when the agent argues. |
| [`hosts/`](hosts/README.md) | Where to paste it — Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI. |
| [`examples/`](examples/) | Optional, and not part of HERO. Real AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md files contributors wrote for their own projects and shared so you can see how they adapted the ideas. Not HERO variants, and not the [short version](RULES.md#the-short-version) — their thresholds are theirs. Borrow the approach, not the file. |
## 📢 What's changed
Only things that change what you should do. Not rewording, not layout — a
changelog of everything buries the one line that mattered.
examples/. New sibling named: stalling.SIB-003); instructions confessed into the product — told "do not mention X", it writes "we do not address X" (SIB-004). Rule 7: deliverable text is not a defense transcript. Distilled from repairing a writing pipeline whose papers had turned into confessions.HERO-R-006 — audit loops that ate the experiment they were auditing. HERO-O-005 — a permanent version tree for every recoverable failure. The best line is in neither: a general "only do the checks you need" lost to a twelve-stage workflow in the same prompt.