[orbital-decay]

That's totally expected. The field of large-scale generalist AI is entirely novel and experimental. It doesn't and can't have rigor of more mature disciplines that had decades to develop.

That said, there's no cargo cult in blindly using heuristics for certain fundamental LLM phenomena that have tons of good studies backing them (e.g. have no extra distractors, group and delimit pieces of the context, etc). If you want quantitative rigor, perform correct evals on your specific task and model.