Agent Instructions

Preserve useful judgment in guidance a future agent can find and apply. A skill earns its place through knowledge, preferences, or recurring failures the agent would otherwise miss. More instructions are not evidence of progress.

Find the instruction's owner

Use dialectic when the purpose or desired behavior is unsettled: articulate the proposed model alongside a sample of the behavior it would produce. Use reactions to both to develop the instructions. Settled edits do not require another discovery conversation.

Ground the guidance in actual work, source material, or the user's corrections. Extract the judgment behind an accepted interaction, not its topic, layout, or turn count. Remove instructions that push against that judgment before adding compensating rules. An example is evidence for a principle, not a template for every future response.