My setup for prompting AI agents · AI Automation Society

My setup for prompting AI agents

If you're building AI agents, I'd urge you to create a template for prompting. Two notable builds in the last month as proof:

I've built an AI agent that has handled over 9,000 emails
Another AI agent that's handling 25k customers.

But here's the full setup:

A claude.md file that references a prompting guideline file, it tells Claude how to write prompts.
Once a prompt is approved, I write at the top "approved for production" which tells Claude that it should not make big changes. This makes sure that the prompt does not get destroyed by Claude.
Push the changes to my GitHub to keep track of all changes.

This last part is where most people go wrong. When they see a mistake, they ask Claude to write an explicit rule to never do that again. The issue is that Claude will only look for that exact case, and if the next case doesn't match it, Claude will skip it. Instead, what I do is write mental models of the idea, what we're trying to do and why. When you do it this way, Claude has to use more reasoning to figure out which mental model makes sense. You're letting Claude think with some constraints.

But this system has cut down my prompting time and also increased my reliability ten fold. And the thing is that I can use this wherever AI agents are used. Sales agent, customer service agent, any type of agent. Because the structure is the exact same every single time. Give me the agent and I'll make it reliable.

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