A Prompt Full of Prohibitions
The instruction sheet for our Dream Team bots had quietly filled up with 「don't」 lines. 「Don't use emojis.」 「Don't write long.」 「Don't guess.」 The blocks worked, but a strange side effect showed up. Skimming twenty drafts, I found six that opened with something like 「Sorry, but I will not use emojis.」 The bot read a prohibition and began its writing by mentioning it.
A Small Experiment: Same Rules, Different Sentences
The content of each rule stayed the same. Only the phrasing changed.
• Don't use emojis → Emphasize with bold text and commas
• Don't write long → Finish each paragraph within three sentences
• Don't guess → Write 「needs checking」 for any value you don't know
We regenerated twenty drafts under the same conditions, and only one began with an apology. The other nineteen went straight to the point.
Why It Might Have Worked
This is a guess, but a prohibition tells the bot what to avoid and leaves open what to write instead. When a gap appears, the bot fills it with a sentence explaining the gap. With an alternative written down, the slot is already occupied.
A Quick Audit You Can Run Today
1. Search the instruction sheet for lines containing 「don't」.
2. For each line, write one sentence answering 「so what should it do instead?」
3. A line with no obvious alternative has an unclear reason, so mark it as a deletion candidate.
At step three, three of our twelve lines were deleted. The rules got shorter, and the bots made fewer excuses.
Words that point the way travel farther than words that block it.