AI Agent Ignoring Instructions? Your Prompt May Be Too Long

It's tempting to keep adding rules to a system prompt every time an agent does something wrong. Past a certain length, new instructions can start competing with earlier ones for the model's attention, and specificity gets diluted.

The fix:

periodically prune the system prompt back to what's actually load-bearing. If two rules are pulling in slightly different directions, that tension is often the real cause of inconsistent behavior — not a model limitation.