Bot Ignores Its Instructions

The prompt says one thing, the bot does another. Find which layer is actually in charge.

Contradiction is the usual culprit, not stubbornness. Bots accumulate edits: the role you wrote in July, the exception you added in August, the file that says something else entirely. Ask the bot to quote the line it followed — the quote shows you which layer won, and usually why.

Fix the system, not the instance: state precedence explicitly (“files win for data, this prompt wins for rules”), replace vague adjectives with numbers, and keep one authority per question. Then re-test with a clean context — a mistake that survives a fresh start is written down somewhere you haven’t looked yet.