Agent Prompt Patterns

Battle-tested patterns for agents that ship, not agents that demo. If your agent works in a live-fire notebook but breaks in production, you have a demo, not an agent.

When to Use

• Designing a new agent's behavioral rules and operating manual
• An agent is hallucinating completions, skipping steps, or claiming work it didn't do
• Building multi-agent pipelines where output quality compounds (or collapses)
• Setting up human-in-the-loop approval tiers for different risk levels
• Enforcing reliability in automated workflows (cron jobs, scheduled tasks, pipelines)
• Writing AGENTS.md or operating manuals for production agent workspaces
• Debugging why an agent keeps violating rules you've already stated
• Evaluating whether an agent should exist at all (deletion test)
• Building harnesses that make autonomy safe and useful