Instruction Budget¶
Rule ID: content-instruction-budget
Check if instruction count in a file exceeds LLM instruction budget (~150)
| Severity | warning (auto) |
| Autofix | llm |
| Since | v0.7.0 |
Research Basis¶
Warns when the count of imperative instructions in a single file exceeds ~150.
This rule counts discrete directives (lines starting with imperative verbs like "use", "always", "never", "ensure"), not raw tokens. The threshold is based on research showing that LLM instruction-following success degrades as a function of instruction count, independent of token length.
The "Curse of Instructions" paper (ICLR 2025) demonstrated that the probability of following all N instructions equals (individual success rate)^N — exponential decay. GPT-4o achieved only 15% success at just 10 simultaneous instructions. The IFScale benchmark (2025) extended this to 500 instructions and found that primacy bias becomes dominant at 150–200 instructions: models begin selectively attending to earlier instructions and ignoring later ones.
The ~150 threshold is where most models cross from "degraded but functional" to "selectively ignoring instructions."
See Instruction Budget vs. Context Budget
for how this differs from the context-budget rule.
References:
- Curse of Instructions: Large Language Models Cannot Follow Multiple Instructions at Once (ICLR 2025) — Success rate = p^N; exponential decay with instruction count
- Jaroslawicz et al., How Many Instructions Can LLMs Follow at Once? (arXiv:2507.11538, Jul 2025) — IFScale benchmark up to 500 instructions; primacy bias strongest at 150–200
- Levy, Jacoby & Goldberg, Same Task, More Tokens — Reasoning degrades at ~3,000 tokens; 150 instructions ≈ 1,500 tokens, leaving headroom