102: Briefing the Agent
How do we brief the agent, and where does the briefing live? An agent starts every session from what is written down. It reads the guidance file and whatever context files exist, and it knows nothing about yesterday's session or the project's unwritten conventions. This chapter teaches delegation as a written brief that carries the state of the work as well as the task, and a task definition that asks a question and fences its purpose. When the agent gets something wrong, you look first for what it could not see, before you reword the prompt. The rest of the chapter is the guidance file, the one document the agent loads at every session start: written as a short index, with each rule checked against the code it describes, and with a section naming the patterns from your other projects that do not belong.
Materials
This Chapter's Insights
- ACI-007: The Delegation Model
- ACI-008: The Prompt That Worked
- ACI-009: Context Engineering vs Prompt Engineering
- ACI-010: The Guidance File
- ACI-011: Style Rules vs Architecture Rules
- ACI-012: Cross-Project Contamination
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