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Add Negative Bleedthrough obstacle#2

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juanmichelini wants to merge 20 commits intomainfrom
add-negative-bleedthrough-obstacle
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Add Negative Bleedthrough obstacle#2
juanmichelini wants to merge 20 commits intomainfrom
add-negative-bleedthrough-obstacle

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Adds a new obstacle documenting how negative tokens bleed into LLM context.

Obstacle: Negative Bleedthrough
Problem: Telling an LLM what not to do activates the very tokens you want it to avoid. Negation words are weak signals — the content words around them dominate attention.

Covers:

  • Token activation mechanics — why "don't mention the moon" puts the moon front and center
  • Research references (Kassner & Schütze, 2020) on how LLMs struggle with negation
  • Why workarounds like caps and repetition don't fix the underlying mechanism
  • Brief note on vision models showing the same behavior (the elephant example)

Adds relationship: obstacles/negative-bleedthrough → related → obstacles/selective-hearing

Split from lexler#19 — this documents the underlying obstacle that "Visualize the Target" solves.

xpepper and others added 20 commits January 2, 2026 20:04
Remove duplicate 'documents/' prefix from relative paths in workshop_path.md.
Since the file is located in the documents/ directory, the links should be
relative to that location (e.g., obstacles/file.md instead of documents/obstacles/file.md).

🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
fix: correct broken links in `workshop_path.md`
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Additional information in "Feedback Loop" pattern
Added Obsess Over Rules anti-pattern
Documents how negative tokens bleed into context and can be
counterproductive when instructing LLMs.

Co-authored-by: openhands <openhands@all-hands.dev>
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7 participants