A good agent brief is a one-pager. If it takes more space than that, the scope is too large and you should split it. We want this first agent in production in days, not quarters.
The five sections
- Goal — one sentence in plain English. Example: "Triage inbound support tickets, auto-respond to the 5 most common questions, escalate the rest with a one-line summary."
- Inputs — what triggers the agent and what data it sees. "Every new ticket in Zendesk, plus the user's account history."
- Tools — the discrete actions the agent can take, with the system it'll touch and who approves. Be specific about what's read-only vs. write.
- Done means — the success criteria. "80% of common questions get a one-line correct auto-response within 5 minutes. The other 20% get escalated with a summary that the human keeps unchanged at least 70% of the time."
- Out of scope — what the agent will explicitly NOT do, version one. This list is what keeps the project from sprawling.
The brief as a contract
Read your brief out loud to a teammate who isn't building the agent. If they can repeat back what it'll do and what it won't, the brief is doing its job. If they hedge with "I think it" or "maybe it," rewrite the goal sentence until they don't.
Knowledge check
0/1 answered1. Which goal statement is brief-shaped?
Discussion
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