I gave Fable 5 five thousand extra words of instructions. It thought better and failed delivery two runs out of three.

Watch now | Every time my AI missed something, I added another rule.

TL;DR

  • AI tools accumulate a 'harness' of custom instructions, prompts, and rules over time.
  • This accumulated harness can become bloated and inefficient, hindering AI performance.
  • A large harness can cause an AI to perform worse, even with improved underlying models.
  • The author developed 'Clean My AI Harness' tools for Claude and Codex to visualize and clean up these setups.
  • Simpler, focused instructions can lead to better AI performance than excessive, accumulated rules.