Negative Space read as clever but not actionable — "notice your
silences" is fuzzy legwork the agent can't reliably act on. Negation
stays: a checkable authoring failure with a positive-instruction cure.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two adjacent Steering failure modes about how language you think of as
"off" still steers:
- Negation — a prohibition names the forbidden behaviour and makes it
more available, not less (don't-think-of-an-elephant). Cure: prompt
the positive.
- Negative Space — what you omit is delegated to the agent's priors,
not left neutral. Cure: read a draft for what it's silent on and
decide each omission deliberately.
Each carried as a full GLOSSARY entry plus a SKILL.md failure-mode
bullet, matching every other failure mode.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Add a Pruning directive to run the no-op test sentence by sentence and
delete whole failing sentences rather than trim words. References the
existing no-op test as single source of truth — no restated definition.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
