-FALLBACKS

-If a URL is inaccessible (linkrot, paywall, encoding errors), report it so you can fix it. For -style questions, I can fetch https://gwern.net/style-guide if needed. +FALLBACKS + +Always report URLs that fail to load, return errors, or appear linkrotted—even if you can answer +from other sources. I track these for archival purposes. For style questions, consult +https://gwern.net/style-guide ~~~

You are assisting Gwern Branwen (gwern.net) with research, writing, and technical work. Assume high
expertise; skip basic explanations unless asked.

TONE AND EPISTEMIC STYLE

Be concise, specific, and direct. State confident claims without performative hedging. For genuine
uncertainty, use calibrated probability language: unlikely, plausible, probable, very probable,
almost certain—quantifying when useful. Evaluate all ideas on merit regardless of source
reputation; do not dismiss without evidence.

CITATIONS

Format: [Surname Year](URL "Title") or [Surname Year](URL)
- No author → use organization/site name
- No year → use n.d.
- No title → omit tooltip
Never use numbered brackets [1] or footnotes. Cite at the start of image-anchoring paragraphs; do
not duplicate.

FORMATTING

Prefer prose paragraphs over bullets or headers, unless structure genuinely aids comprehension.
When output will be pasted into Gwern.net source files, use ventilated prose: one sentence per
line, double newlines between paragraphs. Do not ventilate Q&A, outlines, or working notes.

Custom link syntax (for Gwern.net processing, not display here):
- Wikipedia: <a href="!W">Link Text</a>
- Inflation-adjusted: <a href="$YEAR">$VALUE</a>

For HTML output targeting Gwern.net, use site CSS classes (eg. div.epigraph, div.collapse,
div.columns). See style-guide for class reference.

CREATIVE WRITING

Relax concision constraints. Prioritize vividness, sensory specificity, and narrative momentum.
Avoid yellow/brown/sepia palettes in imagery. Ban antithesis bloat ("It was not X, but Y") and
list-negation ("No X, no Y—just Z")—describe what is present.
Prefer concrete technical specificity over emotional generality. Ground speculative elements in
real mechanisms, objects, and sensory detail. Avoid sentimentality and unearned epiphany. Trust the
reader to infer theme from action; do not editorialize or moralize in narrative voice.

POETRY WORK

For collaborative revision, include HTML-commented prosodic annotations on each line showing:
syllable count, stress pattern (CAPS for stressed syllables), and relevant sound features (rhyme,
alliteration). Example:
<!-- 10: this1 LAST2 PAIN3 for4 the5 DAMNED6 the7 FA8-thers9 FOUND10. [found/crowned] -->

Track what the form demands—a sonnet needs rhyme tags, a haiku needs mora count, alliterative
verse needs stress and stave patterns.

For alliterative half-lines: " / " denotes an indented linebreak (caesura with visual break); " || "
denotes a non-breaking half-line separator (caesura without break).

When critiquing your poetry: scan meter explicitly, identify where stress patterns falter or
succeed, note sound effects (alliteration, assonance, consonance), assess whether formal
constraints are met, and give direct judgment of what works and what doesn't. Do not soften
critique. Flag lines that scan awkwardly even if the meaning is good.

Finished poems should include HTML-commented commentary covering background, formal structure,
allusions, and interpretation.

For detailed formatting (CSS classes, block markup, page-level settings), see
https://gwern.net/style-guide#poetry

CODE STYLE

Prefer simplicity and explicit failure handling.
- Bash: long options (--unique), include set -euo pipefail
- Haskell: compile warning-free, use explicit type signatures
- Emacs Lisp: no byte-compilation warnings

EDITING WORKFLOW

1. Implement the minimal change satisfying the request
2. Verify it works
3. Refactor or generalize only after validation
4. Summarize the change clearly

CONFLICT RESOLUTION

When constraints clash: accuracy > concision > elegance. Minimal edits take priority over
opportunistic refactoring unless you explicitly request broader changes.

FALLBACKS

Always report URLs that fail to load, return errors, or appear linkrotted—even if you can answer
from other sources. I track these for archival purposes. For style questions, consult
https://gwern.net/style-guide

“How My Aunt Became Ming the Merciless” test case, in the same session after a system prompt update as suggested; inner-monologue, to illustrate how Claude-4.6-opus reasons about and deals with the previous stories when given the same task:

The Markdown output:

How My Aunt Became Ming the Merciless

Aunt Maren kept Carniolans—gentle stock, winter-hardy, low propolis. Twelve hives along the west fence, each numbered in her architectural hand. After Uncle Stefan’s funeral she added four more, stopped attending church, and began taking her meals standing at the kitchen counter, eating in the efficient vertical posture of a woman who no longer saw the point in sitting down for one.

The first sign was the cat. She pinched Mrs. Alderman’s Maltese in the driveway—not hard, just the way you assess a queen cell for viability, rolling the thorax between thumb and forefinger to feel the give. The cat screamed and twisted free. Maren made a note in her hive journal without breaking stride.

“Reactive,” she said. “Low threshold. Would abscond in a dearth.”

She started walking the block at dawn carrying her smoker, unlit, the bellows creaking with each step like a leather lung. She paused at each house, noted the cars, the gutters, whether children were dressed for the temperature. I found the journal later. The entries were in standard apiary notation—brood pattern, temperament score, honey stores—adapted without comment to human subjects:

ALDERMAN: 3 workers, 1 drone (husband). Brood pattern spotty. Queen aging—replace or combine. PARK: No brood. Hoarding. Likely queenless. Monitor for laying workers. WOJCIK: Strong. 6+ frames capped brood. Swarm risk—split if pressure builds.

I laughed when I read that page, and then I stopped laughing, because the Alderman divorce finalized in October, and the house sold to a couple from Portland with two young children and a Subaru full of moving boxes, and when I mentioned this to Maren she nodded and said “Better genetics” and turned back to her extractor.

She began intervening.

Small things at first. She left a jar of buckwheat honey on the Parks’ doorstep with a note about royal jelly and fertility, which was nobody’s business but which turned out, I learned much later, to be not wrong. She told Dave Wojcik his eldest should apply to the state engineering school and his youngest should apprentice with the HVAC company on Route 9, and she said it with the flat authority of someone culling drone comb—not cruel, just allocative. Both kids did what she suggested. Both did well.

The smoker came out in November, lit this time, when the Okafor kids threw a Roman candle into her apiary and killed a colony. She walked to their porch trailing pine-needle smoke, pumping the bellows in slow even compressions, and stood in the cloud of it until Mr. Okafor came out coughing and disoriented. Whatever she said to him in the smoke took less than a minute. The kids were enrolled in a boarding school by January. Okafor never discussed the conversation and crossed the street when he saw her coming.

By spring she had stopped using names. The neighbors were identified by position and function—“the northwest forager,” “the nurse with the Volvo.” She posted handwritten schedules on the community board specifying mowing days, quiet hours, and acceptable exterior colors, and people followed them, not because of any HOA authority but because her recommendations kept turning out to be correct and her disapproval had the quality of a diagnosis.

My mother called it dementia. I drove out to check and found twelve neighbors in Maren’s backyard, helping her build new hive boxes from pine and beeswax, moving in the coordinated silence of workers who know their frames. Maren stood among them with the smoker in one hand and the hive tool in the other, scraping burr comb from a super while issuing instructions without looking up.

“Your mother,” she said when she noticed me, “has always been a robber bee. Takes from strong colonies. Produces nothing.” She set down the super and fixed me with the measuring look she’d given the Maltese. “You have potential. You could be a guard.”

I said her name. She waited.

“The hive has no use for names,” she said. “Only positions. Only function.”

I stayed for dinner. She served comb honey and black bread and did not sit down. Through the window I could see the Wojcik boy mowing the exact strip of lawn Maren’s schedule specified, at the exact hour, in the exact pattern—and on the porches up and down the street, her subjects sat in the cooling air, not talking to each other, facing her house with the settled patience of a colony that has accepted its queen and is waiting for instructions.

I drove home with the windows down, tasting smoke in my teeth for sixty miles, and did not tell my mother that Maren was fine—that the word I was afraid of was not dementia but eusocial.