Record the example-led nudge prompt experiment (#393) — it made things worse

Tried rewriting the nudge prompt to lead with five on-topic examples instead
of rules. Three eval runs each side: before 12/13/14 of 15, after 11/12/11.
The loss is all in the address check — formal "вы" and plural imperatives came
back once the "говоришь на ты" rule stopped being its own sentence, and the
on-topic examples leaked their wording into the wrong cases.

Prompt reverted. Only the finding is committed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01CGeSZxh1DCtRxmFVSYVGvJ

PHRASING-EVAL-31-07-2026.md

@@ -103,6 +103,35 @@ but a large part of the jump is that failure now degrades into Russian instead o
 The two remaining failures: one `"..."` recurrence (`routine-stretch`) and one meal nudge
 that never says food.
 
+## Tried and reverted: an example-led nudge prompt (#393)
+
+The idea was that a 0.8B copies examples better than it follows rules, so the nudge prompt
+was rewritten to lead with five on-topic examples (water, break, pills, morning, service) and
+the prose rules were compressed to pay for the tokens: 1190 chars down to 986.
+
+It measured **worse**, three runs each side, same llama-server, same fixture:
+
+| run | before | after |
+|---|---|---|
+| 1 | 12/15 (address 14) | 11/15 (address 13) |
+| 2 | 13/15 (address 15) | 12/15 (address 15) |
+| 3 | 14/15 (address 15) | 11/15 (address 12) |
+
+`feminine` and `hisgender` were 15/15 on all six runs, so they measure nothing here. The
+regression is all in `address`: 44/45 before, 40/45 after. Formal "вы"/"ваше" and plural
+imperatives came back, and so did `"..."`.
+
+Two likely causes, both about the same thing — **examples do not carry a prohibition**. The
+old prompt spent a whole sentence on «говоришь на "ты", в единственном числе»; the new one
+demoted that to one item in a long "никогда" list, and the model stopped obeying it. And
+making the examples on-topic let their *wording* leak: a break case came back as
+«Вы давно не пили воду. Выпей стакан.» — the water example, verbatim, in the wrong slot.
+That is exactly the failure the laundry/laptop examples were chosen to avoid.
+
+Change reverted. What survives is the measurement: a rule the model must obey needs its own
+sentence, and examples must stay off-topic. Also note the before side alone spans 12–14 of
+15 — this fixture cannot resolve anything smaller than about three cases.
+
 ## Broken, found, not fixed
 
 1. ~~**`checkFeminine` only catches half the constraint.**~~ **Fixed** (#381). It scanned for