The part of my harness that earns its tokens isn't instructions, it's the bits that take claims out of the model's hands.

Two examples from daily use on a small business's systems. Telling it to batch browser calls in the system prompt didn't hold; a hook that denies the seventh consecutive single call did. Telling it to record which machine did a piece of work didn't hold either; having the CLI stamp the hostname did.

Both are nearly free in tokens, and that layer is where the reliability actually came from. The prompt-size argument skips straight past it.