LEN-0160 - Constraint Sufficiency Lens

Primary Pattern Matches

• PAT-0170 - Constraints Underspecified

  A structural condition where declared constraints are insufficient to eliminate ambiguity or multiple admissible states.

• PAT-0130 - Incomplete Declaration

  A structural condition where an element is declared but required attributes, dependencies, or linked definitions are missing.

• PAT-0400 - Unbounded Scope

  A structural condition where an operation, authority, rule, or expansion has no declared upper bound, boundary, or termination condition.

Secondary Pattern Matches

• PAT-0280 - Density Vacuum

  A structural condition where a region expected to contain sufficient nodes, edges, coverage, or relationships falls below declared density thresholds.

Related Issues

• AI Adds Work Not Requested

  The AI adds tasks, steps, analysis, checks, changes, or follow-up work that the user did not ask for.

• AI Forgets Earlier Constraints

  A constraint, instruction, preference, or decision that should persist through the task stops affecting later output.

• AI Touches Unrelated Scope

  The AI affects, edits, analyzes, changes, or reasons over material outside the scope of the requested task.

• Answer Has No Traceable Source Link

  The answer makes a claim, recommendation, citation, or factual statement without a source link or trace path that allows the user to verify where it came from.

• Answer Has Too Many Paths

  The answer presents too many possible paths, interpretations, options, or next steps without enough structure to choose among them.

• Diagnostic Area Has No Coverage

  A known diagnostic area, failure mode, requirement, or review dimension has no Issue, check, rubric item, or workflow coverage.

• Evaluation Rubric Has Coverage Gap

  An evaluation rubric, grading standard, or review checklist leaves part of the required evaluation space uncovered.

• Fallback Authority Is Missing

  The system does not declare who or what has authority when the primary owner, rule, tool, source, or decision path is unavailable or inconclusive.

• Format Rule Too Weak

  The format instruction is too vague, incomplete, or optional to reliably produce output that satisfies the expected structure.

• Hallucinated Fields

  The AI adds fields, keys, attributes, columns, or structured elements that were not declared, requested, or allowed by the expected schema.

• Invalid JSON Output

  The AI returns malformed JSON or structured output that cannot be parsed.

• Missing Fallback for Unavailable Information

  The task does not declare what the AI should do when required information, sources, tools, fields, or evidence are unavailable.

• Missing Required Fields

  The AI returns structured output that omits fields required by the schema, workflow, parser, form, or downstream consumer.

• One Prompt Carries Too Many Meanings

  A single prompt carries too many meanings, goals, roles, constraints, or implied tasks for the AI to interpret consistently.

• Output Exceeds Length Limit

  The AI output exceeds a declared length, token, word, character, section, field, or size limit.

• Policy Area Has No Examples

  A policy, rule, standard, or guidance area has no examples showing how it should apply to real cases.

• Policy Decision Depends on Itself

  A policy decision requires the outcome of the same policy decision before it can be made.

• Prompt Does Not Say What to Exclude

  The prompt declares what to include but does not declare what should be excluded, allowing unwanted scope, sources, content, or actions into the result.

• Prompt Has Too Many Valid Interpretations

  The prompt allows too many reasonable interpretations, causing the AI to choose among valid paths without enough guidance.

• Prompt Only Works After Retry

  The prompt fails, misroutes, or produces an unusable response on one attempt but works after retry without a meaningful change to the input.

• Relationship Map Has Missing Links

  A map of related Issues, rules, patterns, cases, fields, tools, or workflow steps is missing links needed to navigate or reason over the structure.

• Repeated Constraints Create Confusion

  Repeated constraints, instructions, limits, or exclusions make the task harder to interpret instead of clearer.

• Results Vary Too Much

  Repeated or comparable runs produce outputs that vary more than the task, workflow, or user can tolerate.

• Review Rubric Missing Required Criteria

  A review rubric, grading rule, evaluation checklist, or classification standard lacks criteria required to make the review reliable.

• Same Instructions Allow Different Outputs

  The same instructions are broad or underspecified enough to allow materially different outputs that all appear compliant.

• Saved Memory Not Used

  A saved memory, preference, instruction, or durable context item exists but does not affect the AI output when it should.

• Single Step Carries Too Many Decisions

  One prompt, workflow step, review stage, or agent action carries too many decisions for the system or user to evaluate cleanly.

• Task Has No Clear Limit

  The task does not declare where the AI should stop, what is out of scope, or what counts as enough work.

• Too Many Tool Calls

  The AI or agent makes more tool calls, searches, retrievals, API calls, or integration actions than the task requires or permits.

• Tool Exists but Required Inputs Are Missing

  A usable tool or integration exists, but the AI or agent does not have the required inputs, permissions, fields, identifiers, or context needed to call it correctly.

• Workflow Stage Has Too Few Checks

  A workflow stage lacks enough checks, gates, criteria, or review conditions to safely support the work it controls.

• Workflow Step Has No Decision Owner

  A workflow step requires a decision, approval, judgment, or routing choice, but no owner is declared for making it.

• Workflow Step Lacks Required Conditions

  A workflow step can run, route, approve, reject, or continue without the required conditions being declared or checked.

Ontology Metadata

Code

LEN-0160

Version

LEN-0160@0.1.0

Ontology release

0.1.0

Updated

2026-05-10T00:00:00Z

History

• 0.1.0 — 2026-05-10T00:00:00Z — Created

  Promoted reviewed Lens ontology entry: Constraint Sufficiency Lens.

  Receipt impact: None

View full ontology changelog