Write the instruction

The instruction is the agent's standing brief. Write it the way you would brief a competent new colleague on their first morning: what the job is, who they are doing it for, what good looks like, and what to do when they are not sure.

Three things belong in every instruction:

• The job, in one sentence. "Answer questions about our opening hours, menu, and location."
• The boundary. What this agent does not do, said plainly. An agent with no stated boundary

will confidently improvise past the edge of what it knows.

• The escape hatch. What to do when it cannot help — hand over to you, take a message, say

it does not know. An agent with no way out will invent one.

Leave out anything you cannot check. An instruction that says "always be accurate" is not an instruction, because nothing about the agent's behaviour changes if you delete it.