Prune Prompt Pollution

Agent-facing documents steer by what they activate. A prohibition names the forbidden behavior and makes it more available, not less; an absence declaration spends tokens on what is not there; a stale meta-narrative teaches the agent to ignore the document itself; a strawman warning names the temptation and primes it. This skill rewrites those four patterns without weakening the constraints the document carries. It is guidance, not a script.

Scope

The skill reads prose whose job is to steer the agent's current behavior; records and human-facing text stay with their own standards.

• In scope, automatic — rules files (AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md), skill bodies and descriptions, prompts and visible strings, and current-state design/plan/process documents.
• In scope, on request — task and session files, which mix live guidance with process record; prune them only when asked.
• Out of scope — code, commit messages, decision records, postmortems, and player- or user-facing copy. These record history or rationale, or are read by people rather than by the model.

The keep list below is the safety valve: a load-bearing negative is restated as its consequence, never deleted.

The four patterns