Context has two budgets, not one: the information budget everyone thinks about, and an instruction budget, where conflicting instructions cost the model real computation to ignore.

Founder of HumanLayer, author of the 12-factor agents…

But it's also your instruction budget is like if you give the model too many instructions and especially too many conflicting instructions and that's in your initial prompt and also like if you have a conversation you start going down a path and then you change your mind and you start going down a different you actually I don't want to do any of that I want to do this. It's like a it's a lot of computation the model has to do to notice that it has to ignore that whole thing.