Dropping negative rules for 'Synthetic Scars' cut repeat regressions to 0% across 266 agent tickets
RandalSchwartz · reddit · 2026-11-11
The author found that negative rules like "Do NOT use withOpacity" in agent instruction files backfire—attention lights up the exact token neighborhood, and context compaction mangles checklists on monorepos.
The fix: 'Synthetic Scars' replacing prompt checklists
- 4-part structure: Wound, Trap, Circuit Breaker, Orthogonal Reflex
- A 1976-style make dependency graph for rule relations
- An isolated Adversarial Critic subagent
- A 1980 Smalltalk-style state log
Across 266 production tickets and 626 codified scars on a Flutter codebase, the repeat regression rate dropped to 0.0%.
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