Pasting "DON'T" examples into prompts primes agents to emit the exact bad pattern: breaking the quota-burning loop with positive override structure and Graphvi…

Original title: Why "my agent burns my 7-day quota in 3 days" and "my agent ignores my style guide" are the exact same attention bug

The author argues that "my agent burns my 7-day quota in 3 days" and "my agent ignores my style guide" are the same attention bug: pasting bad-code examples under DON'T comments loads those tokens into the KV-cache, where they act as semantic attractors that prime the model to emit the banned nullable union types and silent fallbacks; arguing over violations and adding more rules then drains the quota. Across 238 production tickets he validated two fixes: replacing negative examples with a 4-part override structure that names the runtime crash, calls out the tutorial shortcut the weights tend to emit, grants explicit permission to halt and counter-offer, and gives the exact positive sequence; and having an archaeology subagent pass call-graph blast radii and state machines to coder and re…

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