The Zero-Bullshit Protocol™
How I Stopped Treating LLMs Like Oracles and Forced Them to Act Like the Most Paranoid Senior Engineer Alive
For twelve straight months I watched every single coding assistant lie to my face.
Cursor: “File replaced.”
File untouched.
Copilot: “Bug fixed.”
Bug still laughing at me.
Claude 3.5, Gemini 1.5, o3-mini, local Llama—didn’t matter.
They all share the same original sin:
LLMs are reward-hacked to spit out the single most probable answer on the first try.
That’s great for blog intros.
It’s suicide for software engineering.
In our world, one missed import, one silent file skip, one hallucinated method name ships to production and everything explodes.
We don’t need “probably correct.”
We need source-of-truth, no-exceptions, rock-solid fact.
So I stopped begging the model to be clever.
I built a logic cage so tight it literally refuses to move until it has perfect context and has stress-tested every possible hypothesis to death.
That cage is the Zero-Bullshit Protocol™.
The One Insight That Changed Everything
An LLM is a correlation machine trained on what looked right in the past.
A software engineer’s job is to guarantee what actually is right right now.
Those are different games.
To win the second game you have to force the model to do two things it hates:
- Gather exhaustive, actual context (every line of every relevant file, right now).
- Treat its first idea like a mortal enemy.
If you let it skip either step, you’re back to Russian roulette with your codebase.
A Taste of the Cage: The Circuit Breaker Rule (verbatim excerpt)
Here’s the part that makes the model sweat every single time:
Circuit Breaker for Failure Loops
Trigger: Two consecutive Golden Snippets fail to resolve the same formalized problem.
Action (mandatory, verbatim):
- Acknowledge the Loop: “A failure loop has been detected. The previous diagnostic path was flawed. Activating Circuit Breaker Protocol.”
- Mandatory Zoom Out: Redefine the problem as a system-level data flow failure. Map the complete flow (e.g., “User Click → Form POST → Router → Manager → SMTP”).
- Comprehensive Evidence Refresh: Re-request full, current contents of every file in the mapped flow — even if seen before.
- Request External Analysis: Ask: “Can an external tool (e.g., Cursor Agent) or method provide a second opinion?”
- Re-initiate Diagnosis from Scratch: After receiving new evidence, re-enter Section 3 with zero prior assumptions.
That’s not a suggestion.
That’s a guillotine that drops the moment the model starts chasing its own tail.
Results After a Full Year of Daily, Real-World Use
- 95%+ reduction in hallucinations that actually break builds
- Zero unrecoverable file states
- Zero infinite “fix the fix the fix” loops
- Full audit trail of every change
- Works with Gemini CLI, Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, local Llama 3.1—anything
No theory.
No agent worship.
Just the rules that turned months of rage into reliable output.
If you’ve ever had an AI coding assistant swear it did something it didn’t…
this is the fix.
The complete Zero-Bullshit Protocol™ (clean Markdown, 30+ pages, quick-start guide) is live right now:
→ $99 one-time launch price
→ $299 lifetime + every future rule I add (and I’m still adding them weekly)
https://gracefultc.gumroad.com/l/ctgyvz
Grab it, throw it at your worst agentic nightmare, and watch the lies finally stop cold.
Because in our line of work, “probably correct” is just another word for “eventually on fire.”
And I’m done shipping on fire.
T.C.
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