See how AI instructions decay, then write ones that hold
This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition What I Built I told an agent Never write directly to the database . A long session later, context window full, it wrote directly to the database. The rule loading mark was still sitting in the prompt. The model had just stopped weighting and attending to it. It's an invisible failure. No error is being thrown. The task comes back subtly wrong, and the rule reads perfectly fine when you go back and check it. I wanted to make it visible, so I built an interactive field you can drag around. Every rule you write for an agent is a hill. Its height is how well the rule is written: a directive-led, backtick -anchored rule stands tall, a hedged and vague one sits low. Then you raise the water. The water is context load. As it rises the low rules go under first, in order of how well they were written. The weak ones drown while you watch. Three of the hills are high-stakes prohibitions, the Never... rules. They drown too. That is the whole point of the piece. A rule you cannot afford to lose does not belong in prose at all; it belongs on a runtime hook that runs as code, not attention. The field flags those in red the moment they go under. Underneath the field is a second tool: a client-side lint that reads an instruction and names the surface tells (hedges, shouting, politeness, a ban placed before its directive). It is deliberately not a score. It catches what a little regex can honestly catch, and points at the real analysis for the rest. Demo Play it on its own page. Drag to orbit, drag the load slider to raise the water: ▶ Open the live demo Each of the nine instruction patterns in the demo links to its rule page on reporails.com/rules . Code Code is available on Codepen: https://codepen.io/editor/G-bor-M-sz-ros-the-reactor/pen/019f4cad-e344-78bf-b7bc-919972f42a4e The whole thing is one self-contained HTML file: no build step, no dependencies, no backend. The CodePen above is the full source, so you can read eve