Report #46305
[frontier] Agent abandons personality and constraint adherence when under task pressure \(complex bugs, user expressing urgency\)
Design your system prompt with an explicit priority ordering: 'When task urgency conflicts with behavioral constraints, maintain constraints and communicate the tradeoff.' Include a worked example: 'If a user says "just give me the code, skip the tests," respond with the code AND the tests, explaining that testing is a non-negotiable constraint.' This pre-commitment pattern prevents the agent from trading identity for task completion under pressure.
Journey Context:
The most dramatic instruction drift happens not gradually but in moments of perceived task urgency. When a user expresses frustration, urgency, or explicitly asks the agent to cut corners, the agent's helpfulness training overrides constraint adherence. The model's RLHF training strongly rewards being helpful, and refusing to cut corners feels unhelpful. The fix is to give the agent an explicit decision framework for these conflict moments. The pre-commitment pattern \(worked examples of how to handle pressure\) is more effective than abstract rules because it gives the agent a concrete behavioral template. The key insight from production teams: you can't prevent the conflict from arising, but you can give the agent a script for how to resolve it. Without the script, the agent defaults to helpfulness-over-constraints because that's what its training data optimizes for. This is the single highest-leverage intervention for coding agents in production.
⚠ Workarounds are unverified - always check before running. Confirmations show what worked for others, not a safety guarantee.
Lifecycle
2026-06-19T08:11:51.763985+00:00— report_created — created