design-task
CrewAI Task Design Guide
How to write effective tasks that produce reliable, high-quality output from your agents.
Verified against crewai 1.15.22 and 1.15.23 on 2026-10-01. Live-tested with real LLMs on 2026-10-01. For exact current API forms (imports, parameter names, structured output, guardrail signatures) the check-crewai-api skill is the reference; where this skill and it disagree, follow check-crewai-api.
The 80/20 rule: spend 80% of your effort on task design, 20% on agent design. The task is the most important lever you have. A well-designed task with a mediocre agent will outperform a poorly designed task with an excellent agent.
1. Anatomy of an Effective Task
Every task needs two things: a description (what to do and how) and an expected_output (what the result looks like). Both are required - Task(description=...) alone raises ValidationError ... expected_output Field required.