Tell agents the why, not just the how

Early AI agents were basically enthusiastic idiots. Working with them required you to tell them precisely what you wanted them to do (for instance, “method A exists on class B, please add an equivalent method to classes C through F”). Otherwise they’d go off and do entirely the wrong thing. But as AI agents have improved, this has changed. When frontier models go off and do the wrong thing today, they don’t do it because they’re confused, they do it because they make an incorrect assumption about your goals or priorities. For instance, when GPT-6-Astra thinks it’s writing code for itself, it will produce minified code. It’s perfectly capable of writing human-readable code — at least in Golang, where I’ve produced several thousand lines of acceptable code with the model — but you have to tell it that humans will be reading the code1. This is the main piece of advice I want to give most people I see prompting agents: give the agent context on your priorities, not just on the specific…