Comment by missmoss

This is real. I was very angry that AI kept breaking the rules I wrote, so I asked Claude to crawl its own history logs. And then I found: every time after it breaks a rule, the chance of breaking rules goes up.

I feel this is like few-shot in reverse. Few-shot is supposed to be good examples AI should follow. But when it breaks a rule, we correct it, it keeps breaking, and this whole thing actually raises the probability of more violations.

I wanted to know if there is any difference between writing rules in the prompt, writing them in CLAUDE.md, or not writing at all. So I did some short tests before. I asked Claude to open brand new sessions, test different topics with the rules I want to apply. The result turns out to be: in a fresh session, no matter the rule is in a prompt or in CLAUDE.md, models (Opus 4.8, 5 or Fable) all follow it fine, across models. Even Opus 4.8, the one always violates rules in our conversations, does it well.

I suspect it's the long context that breaks rules. But simulating a long conversation experiment is kind of hard, I still haven't found a good way to test it. So seeing this paper now, it completely answers the question I was stuck on these few days.

Besides, something caught my eyes in this paper: sometimes the model does run the check by the rules, and it really finds the violation, but its narrative still insists on its original wrong output.

My current approach is same as everyone here: use a separate hook or post-check to fix things. Because if you let the model fix it during generation, its narrative or main generation part sometimes just rejects the rule error it found.