Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents
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Re: Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents
#2HANDBOOK.md is a benchmark for long-context agentic instruction following, modeled on how enterprise employees follow company handbooks in their day-to-day work. Each task is a unique RL environment with internal tools and external MCP servers, spanning five enterprise domains: Finance, Medical Billing, Insurance, Logistics, and HR.
The prompts reflect the actual jobs enterprise workers perform every day. Each task drops an AI agent into a live company environment, requiring them to cross-reference an extensive, multi-section handbook against a cluttered inbox, a multi-channel Slack workspace, Jira queues, and a stack of files (spreadsheets, PDFs), and working out both what to do and what the handbook forbids.
Re: Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents
#3Yeah checks out with my anecdotal experience with Claude. It is pretty great at following instructions - for about 10 minutes, after which it seems to ignore things I told it before.
I have quite explicit and strong instructions (e.g. don't write massive comments, use existing functionality, etc.) in CLAUDE.md files which seem to get bypassed surprisingly quickly when doing real tasks. Yet if I tell it these things in a prompt during the task, it performs way better.
Result is I'm trying to resist adding more and more things to CLAUDE.md files which in some scenarios it does well but in other scenarios totally ignores and messes up.
Re: Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents
#4Opus 4.8 (max thinking) scored highest and Grok 4.3 lowest
It's hard to understand what's going on with Grok. It's like it has capabilities in a theoretical sense but maybe the training is so focused on being in x.com/grok.com with the web search tool enabled for "is this true?11" type queries that with any API type usage with document workflow instructions, tool use, code gen etc it completely falls over
Re: Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents
#5Yeah checks out with my anecdotal experience with Claude. It is pretty great at following instructions - for about 10 minutes, after which it seems to ignore things I told it before. I have quite explicit and strong instructions (e.g. don't write massive comments, use existing functionality, etc.) in CLAUDE.md files which seem to get bypassed surprisingly quickly when doing real tasks. Yet if I tell it these things i…
I believe the correct static instructions are about getting it at the right starting point for whatever class of projects you're working on; not as a continued referencable or "HOWTO" of what it's doing. They're all just "grooming" the LLM for future instructions.
The coding harness is what's getting it to continually align to your current instructions.
This is very obvious with local models.
Re: Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents
#6This is a problem with long context models. To put it as simple and as bluntly as possible: just because they claim you can use 1M tokens in your context doesn't mean its true and you should do that.
Due to extreme quantization of models and the context's KV cache, and also just really shitty samplers provided to the user (hell, most are just getting rid of sampler knobs altogether), this problem will absolutely continue.
Want it to go away, almost like magic? Local inference. When its under your control, and no longer being forced to hold it wrong, all of the common LLM defects will go away.
Re: Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents
#7Why would anyone think that models optimized for efficient context management, giving much more weight to a short sliding window, would attend to distant, heavily diluted tokens?
Plus the model's capacity to take more context into account and actually integrate it to the output is simply limited by the number of activated parameters. If you give it a playbook, you are forcing to choose it between attending to the playbook and the task at hand.
If you want to force it to work step-by-step, you need to present the steps one-by-one. Ideally with rules for the current step at hand and maybe relevant input again, depending on overall task size.
Why did you think models love to re-read files before editing them? It increases recall quality and thus edit precision and thus benchmarks.
Re: Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents
#8Yeah checks out with my anecdotal experience with Claude. It is pretty great at following instructions - for about 10 minutes, after which it seems to ignore things I told it before. I have quite explicit and strong instructions (e.g. don't write massive comments, use existing functionality, etc.) in CLAUDE.md files which seem to get bypassed surprisingly quickly when doing real tasks. Yet if I tell it these things i…
I believe the correct static instructions are about getting it at the right starting point for whatever class of projects you're working on; not as a continued referencable or "HOWTO" of what it's doing. They're all just "grooming" the LLM for future instructions. The coding harness is what's getting it to continually align to your current instructions. This is very obvious with local models.
As a hobbyist, I find it difficult to figure out how to make Claude stick with some repeating things I want it to do after every major action, like re-evaluate the completeness of tests, update the documentation, etc. And CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md definitely did NOT help there, sadly.
Re: Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents
#9I noticed this behaviour a few months back, I think I was using Sonnet 4.6 at the time... I have strict rules about comments in the codebase, this all for personal projects, and the reason I restrict comments is to keep the token count low.
At some point between the model i was using and the previous version of it, Claude started inserting massive comments with references to tickets and other tasks. All this while having specific directives on the CLAUDE.md
Since then I resorted to developing my crapware as if I was the floor manager of a vehicle assembly line, and I have a few highly-specialized sub-agents running errands around the main session, but only ever taking care of a single concern. The main session builds with the knowledge contained in things like CLAUDE.md but the sub agents make sure things like the no/low-comments directives are either enforced, or factored into the final product.
Re: Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents
#10Why would anyone think that models optimized for efficient context management, giving much more weight to a short sliding window, would attend to distant, heavily diluted tokens? Plus the model's capacity to take more context into account and actually integrate it to the output is simply limited by the number of activated parameters. If you give it a playbook, you are forcing to choose it between attending to the pla…
> limited by the number of activated parameters
not sure I got it?
Separately, the frontier labs are kinda pushing us into that behaviour by releasing models with ever-larger context windows.