🛡 Quietus Capslockius

"Stop yelling at the robot. It heard you the first time. It hears everything."

Emphasis was a workaround: older models skimmed, so authors shouted the important parts. The 5-family doesn't skim. It reads emphasis as priority weighting — a CRITICAL: YOU MUST paragraph gets applied far outside its intended scope, and the calm sentence next to it, which may carry the harder constraint, gets discounted by contrast.

What to scan

Every memory file (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, nested), hook message text (block and advisory strings agents actually read), skill and agent definitions, and output styles.

Anti-patterns to find

1. Emphasis inflation. CRITICAL, IMPORTANT, YOU MUST, NEVER EVER, ABSOLUTELY on rules that are ordinary conventions. Count them: if more than a handful of rules are critical, none are.
2. All-caps sentences. Whole sentences or paragraphs in caps. Caps for a token name (a verdict string, an env var) is fine; caps as volume is the anti-pattern.
3. Stacked negation. "NEVER do X. Do NOT do X. X is FORBIDDEN." — the same prohibition three ways. Repetition reads as three rules and triples the attention tax.
4. Threats and doom framing. "…or everything breaks", "this WILL destroy the project". The 5-family treats these as literal severity signals and becomes over-cautious in adjacent, unrelated decisions.
5. Panic markers as prose. ⚠/🚨 sprinkled through a document until they stop meaning anything. A marker earns its place on a live hazard, not on history.
6. Emphasis doing scoping's job. A rule shouted because it was once violated, where the real fix is a trigger/scope rewrite (→ hand to Clarificus Maxima) or a blocking hook (mechanism beats volume — a hook achieves near-total compliance; shouting does not).

Fix prescriptions

Calibration

Measure before/after: count emphasis tokens (CRITICAL|IMPORTANT|MUST|NEVER|ALWAYS|⚠|🚨, case-sensitive caps-runs ≥2 words) and the word count they normalize against.

• Under 500 words: report the raw count, not a rate. One NEVER commit secrets in a 300-word memory file scores 3.3 per 1,000 and would grade unhealthy against "near zero" — while being a textbook-correct use, exempt by the fix table above. The denominator is too small to carry a rate; judge each token on its own merits instead.
• Over 500 words: the rate per 1,000 words is meaningful. Healthy files sit near zero outside destructive-action guards; above roughly 10 per 1,000, emphasis has stopped carrying information.

Bounds

• If legilimens-anthropica ran this session, prefer its measured numbers over the ones in this file. This file is a snapshot; that pass is the current reading.
• Scope: memory files, hook block and advisory message text, skill and agent definitions, output styles. Not application source, and not code comments.
• Cap: 15 findings, ranked by how far the shouted rule reaches beyond its intent. The census carries the rest.
• Done when the scope is swept once and the emphasis census is computed — the census, not an exhaustive per-site list, is the deliverable.
• Quote once, at read time; mark anything you cannot re-confirm UNVERIFIED rather than re-reading to check yourself.
• See skills/opus-pocus/references/casting-safety.md for the full rules.

Report format

Per finding: file:line · class (1–6) · quoted text · rewrite. Lead with the census: emphasis tokens per file, the three loudest files, and the count that would remain after fixes. SCANNED NOTHING if no instruction layer was found.