agent-prompt-patterns

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

When NOT to Use

• One-shot prompts with no agent persistence — these patterns assume continuity
• Pure chatbot / conversational UX with no action-taking capability
• Academic prompt engineering research — these are production patterns, not benchmarks
• Agents with no filesystem, no tool access, and no side effects — nothing to harness
• You're still in the "make it work at all" phase — get basic functionality first, then harden

1. Consumer-First Design

Principle: Every agent output must have a named consumer. If nobody uses the output, the agent shouldn't exist.

This is the most important pattern because it kills bloat before it starts. Agents proliferate. Each one feels useful when you build it. Six months later you have 14 agents and can't remember what half of them do.

The Deletion Test

Ask: If I delete this agent, which other agent's work breaks?

If the answer is "nothing" or "I'm not sure," the agent is a vanity project.

# Agent Registry (in AGENTS.md)

## daily-digest
- **Consumers:** Sam (morning briefing), weekly-report agent (aggregation)
- **Deletion impact:** Sam loses morning summary, weekly-report loses daily inputs
- **Verdict:** KEEP

## inbox-sorter
- **Consumers:** None identified
- **Deletion impact:** Unknown
- **Verdict:** CANDIDATE FOR REMOVAL — validate or kill within 7 days