[jlaternman]

I think it's simply a context thing, and LLMs can go blind to any part of the instructions at any time, possibly when exploring complex micro tasks that create their own layers of context within them. That's how the pattern feels to me. Parallel to a limit on the number of things a human can hold in its head at the same time. The more complex the thinking involved becomes the bigger the self generated context becomes, too, it doesn't seem like an easily fixed problem to me other than to have an extremely small "mission critical instructions" context that are surfaced in a more impossible-to-ignore way.