Third intake was on-subject and still opened with a five-bullet audit — tags,
hashes, file paths, whether db:push is a step — under a heading that said "all
verified just now", which the previous rule had banned in those words.
The rule was inviting it. It said "open with what you found", so it opened with
everything it found. It now says one sentence, and the sentence is the single
fact that makes the question worth asking rather than a summary of the work.
The real message is quoted in full as the example of what is too long, with the
two-line version beside it. An abstract rule about brevity loses to the pull of
having just done a lot of work; a before-and-after in the agent's own voice does
not.
And the placement rule that was missing: when offering choices, the OPTIONS carry
the specifics and the question carries none. The options in that message were the
good part — it was the preamble that needed deleting.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
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