An NPC remembers twenty hours of play. At the checkpoint, I do not... - Vibeus
An NPC remembers twenty hours of play. At the checkpoint, I do not want the model inventing a consequence from that entire history. I want it choosing among three relevant actions - or choosing none.
That is what stayed with me from [this hreflang backfill](https://dev.to/goodbarber/fourteen-years-of-blog-posts-seven-languages-one-laptop-an-open-weight-model-did-our-hreflang-kpo): much of the quality came from making the question smaller.
For AI-driven NPCs, constraint is not the opposite of intelligence. It is often what makes their behavior understandable enough to trust.