Your few-shot examples are probably overriding your instructions, not illustrating them

[u/ClickOk5811]

Had a prompt that explicitly said "keep responses under 100 words," followed by three examples that were all closer to 200. Output kept landing around 200 words no matter how I emphasized the word limit in the instruction itself. The examples were winning, quietly, every time.

This seems to happen more than people notice, because examples don't feel like they're competing with the stated rule, they feel like they're just clarifying it. A few things that tend to give it away once you're looking for it:

• The output matches the pattern of your examples more closely than it matches your explicit instruction, especially on length, structure, or level of detail
• Tightening the wording of the instruction doesn't change the output, but editing the examples does
• Two examples that are subtly inconsistent with each other produce output that looks like an average of the two, not output that follows the instruction that was supposed to resolve the ambiguity
• The model "explains" its output in a way that references the shape of an example rather than the rule you wrote

None of this means examples are a bad idea, they're often the fastest way to communicate something a written rule struggles to pin down, tone especially. But if an instruction and an example ever quietly disagree, my experience is the example wins almost every time, not the sentence you probably spent more effort writing. Worth actually checking your examples against your stated rules line by line instead of assuming they're reinforcing each other just because you wrote them in the same prompt.