Bitter Pill Engineering

Purpose

Audit an AI instruction set for rules that restate defaults, conflict, duplicate another source, preserve a one-off workaround, remain vague, or prescribe reasoning choreography without improving the required outcome.

The core test is: Would a more capable model make this rule unnecessary? If yes, the rule is probably scaffolding rather than a durable contract.

Workflow routing

Instruction discovery

Discover instructions from current, observable sources instead of assuming harness-specific settings keys: