NamedRules

Many tools like ChatGPT allow you to personalize your assistant by adding a set of instructions that get applied to every conversation.

If you have certain conventions, rules, or standards that you always want your AI to follow, list them here.

There's no guarantee the LLM will follow them, especially once the the conversations get long. Occasionally, the AI will need to be reminded about a particular rule. To make this easier, I create a easy-to-type name for each rule, so I can just tell the AI exactly what rule it’s failed to follow.

Example:

## NoSyntheticData

**Definition**: If you encounter a problem when working with data, NEVER fall back to some fake or simplified data. You can do this in a test in order to debug the issue, but NEVER use fake data in non-test code.

[Examples of violations]

If I catch the AI oversimplifying the problem by using a contrived example, I can simply reply “NoSyntheticData” and it will know exactly what it did wrong and make the appropriate correction. (You can also combine this with the “Go Back in Time” technique, and simply append it as a reminder (“don’t forget: NoSyntheticData”) to your previous request that generated the bad behavior.

This works because LLMs have been optimized for “Needle-in-a-Haystack” use cases—retrieving relevant facts from earlier content. (This optimization is to make something called “RAG” work well. Future post to come.) It might not proactively remember the rule on its own, but if you remind it, it can retrieve and re-state it to bring it to the front of its mind, so to speak.

credit to normalnormie on the Cursor Forum for the idea.