# Skill Pattern Research Notes

A promoted research note collecting evidence behind recurring skill structure patterns.

## Patterns and evidence

1. **Explicit scope boundaries improve instruction following**
   - Super-NaturalInstructions (Wang et al., 2022): broad, explicit instruction framing improves task generalization.
2. **Concrete examples outperform abstract-only guidance**
   - GPT-3 paper (Brown et al., 2020): few-shot examples consistently improve downstream behavior.
3. **Checklists reduce skipped steps**
   - Chain-of-Thought prompting (Wei et al., 2022): structured intermediate prompts improve completion reliability.
4. **Constrained behavior framing lowers unsafe compliance**
   - Constitutional AI (Bai et al., 2022) and sycophancy analyses (Perez et al., 2022): explicit refusal/constraint framing improves adherence.

## References

- https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02311
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08073
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03873

[Inspirations](../inspirations.md)