avada-verbosa

🔮 Avada Verbosa

"Delete what nothing measures. Mourn nothing that doesn't fail an eval."

Mature instruction stacks accrete compensation for weaknesses the current model no longer has, and text survives because deletion feels risky and nobody measures. This spell makes deletion cheap and measured.

Practitioner reports of large deletions from mature prompt stacks with no measured eval loss are common; treat any specific fraction as unverified. This pass exists to produce your number, not to reproduce someone else's — and a claim without its measurement is exactly what legilimens-anthropica lists as an anti-pattern.

Prerequisites — no baseline, no killing curse

1. A baseline. Either a real eval suite (tasks the repo cares about, scored), or at minimum The Pensieve's telemetry week: loop counts, correction rates, token burn, session outcomes. Without a before, "no eval loss" is unfalsifiable.
2. A revert path. Instruction files under version control, deletions in their own commits, one theme per commit — so any regression bisects to its deletion.

Selecting candidates

Rank instruction text by suspicion, highest first:

1. Compensation prose — text telling the model to do what the current family does unprompted (thoroughness demands, self-verification, "think step by step" relics).
2. Explanation prose — paragraphs justifying a rule to the model. The rule may earn its place; the three-paragraph rationale rarely does (archive it — Obliviate Fossilium's move).
3. Mechanically-enforced rules — prose restating what a blocking hook already enforces. The hook survives; the paragraph is a candidate.
4. Never-observed rules — rules whose trigger situation hasn't occurred in recorded history (transcripts, git log). Untriggered text is untested text.
5. Low-stakes preferences — formatting and style minutiae the user never actually enforces in review.

Never candidates: destructive-action guards, security boundaries, data-egress rules, anything a measured incident put there (check the repo's decision records before selecting — a rule with a scar behind it needs its ground re-examined, not ablated on suspicion), and anything that also serves a human reader.