unhobble

Constraints written to protect against a weaker model's failure modes go net-negative once the model's judgement exceeds the rule. They collide with each other and with the user's actual request, and the model spends its reasoning resolving the collision instead of doing the work. The correction is deletion, not refinement.

Anthropic's Claude Code team removed over 80% of Claude Code's system prompt for Claude 5 models with no measurable loss on their coding evals. The diagnostic that started it: reading their own transcripts, they found "leave documentation as appropriate" fighting "DO NOT add comments" inside a single request.

This skill is that cut, made repeatable — and made safe, because the naive version of the rule deletes load-bearing prose.

The measure-then-adjudicate split