Instruction Compounding

When a model performs a behavior natively, an instruction telling it to do that behavior stops being redundant and becomes additive, pushing the behavior past its useful point — so Anthropic's Opus 5 prompting guide prescribes deleting verification, re-check, and don't-think instructions rather than rewording them; underneath it sits a measured capacity floor, with all-rules-obeyed compliance hitting zero by ~80 simultaneous instructions on all five models tested, independent of format