[atomicnumber3]

I also find that every additional "constraint" you add in your context window, the dumber the agent gets, and it goes double if your constraint is unusual. To illustrate:

"Do x" - for baseline, assume this generally does X fine.

"Do X, don't use javascript". - even if X already didn't use javascript, this will often perform worse. It will perform even _more_ worse if X is difficult or unusual to do without javascript even if there is some perfectly serviceable way to do it.

Also, despite "don't use javascript", sometimes it just still uses a little bit of javascript anyway, and usually in a spot that would actually be extremely annoying/inconvenient to them remove that js yourself (when you would've otherwise reconsidered your approach at a higher level, to either use js, or to just want something different that is easier to do without js).

[joquarky]

I feel like there's a limit on constraints that doesn't necessarily follow the context limits. I've assumed this is "attention heads" which I understand are an independent limitation, but I'm not smart enough to understand all the layers involved in these models so I could be wrong there.

I do observe the same thing. There are a limited number of constraints you can add and once you exceed that, you'll play whack-a-mole if you insist on all of them.

This is why I tend toward a more wu-wei attitude to constraints.

For example:

- Do I really need this constraint?

- How does the agent tend to behave in this scenario it if unconstrained? Is this behavior/result an acceptable pattern for this solution?

- Is the constraint implicitly followed often enough that I can trade spending tokens recovering from a deterministic test that enforces the constraint rather than preemptively state it in the prompt?

If I get into the situation where I need more constraints than can fit in context/attention without the need to regularly play whack-a-mole, then I break the module down into sub-modules with fewer, more specific constraints.