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Tautological

Rule ID: content-tautological

Detect tautological instructions that the model already follows by default
Severity warning (auto)
Autofix llm
Since v0.7.0

Research Basis

Detects instructions the model already follows by default ("write clean code", "follow best practices", "be thorough").

These instructions consume context tokens without adding signal. Anthropic's context engineering guide warns: "Be thoughtful and keep your context informative, yet tight." Every tautological instruction dilutes the model's attention across tokens that carry zero new information. Levy et al. demonstrated that reasoning performance degrades at ~3,000 prompt tokens — every wasted token brings you closer to that cliff.

The Claude Code best practices documentation is explicit: "Ask yourself: 'If I remove this line, will Claude make mistakes?' If the answer is no, cut it. Every line must earn its place."

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