May 25, 2026 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Stop Prompting Your AI Agent. Give It a Playbook.
May 26, 2026 at 3:35 am
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May 26, 2026 at 6:17 am
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May 26, 2026 at 7:56 am
I have heard a lot about giving agents specific instructions, and guardrails to discourage hallucinations, but playbook (or runbook) is a good way to think about giving it instructions just like an entry-level person, and breaking the instructions into sections to make troubleshooting easier. I have not yet used AI for actually accomplishing tasks, but I will try this strategy of making the prompt more like a program.
May 26, 2026 at 3:26 pm
Glad the runbook framing resonated. Engineers already know how to write runbooks, happy path first, then failure branches, tight enough that someone at 2am can follow it without asking questions. An agent at runtime is in roughly the same situation.
One tip when you start: write the failure-handling section first. It forces you to think about what the agent shouldn't do, which is where most of the unpredictable behavior lives. Once you're using it for real tasks, the playbook also becomes your debugging artifact you can diff the agent's output against it section by section instead of staring at a bare prompt with no reference point.
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