agent-experience

• Start with minimal context: expose purpose, available actions, and constraints first; load detailed instructions when needed.
• Make discovery explicit: every deferred resource needs a clear description and a reliable way to retrieve it.
• Keep critical constraints visible: permissions, destructive effects, and required validation should appear before the relevant action.
• Prefer bounded outputs: return concise results with identifiers or paths for retrieving details; avoid dumping entire logs or documents.
• Use locality: include a bounded amount of likely needed adjacent context with an operation’s result. For example, deliver a thread reply with a few preceding messages. Mark omissions and truncation explicitly, and provide a way to retrieve more.
• Evaluate total work: saving context is useful only if it does not cause more searches, repeated reads, or mistakes.

Tool definitions

• Delete obvious constraints. Omit rules the model learns from the call result, such as a missing file failing to read or a failed send not being delivered.
• Describe behavior, not implementation. State what the tool does and returns; omit internal mechanisms, output markers the model sees in results, and enforcement details.
• Put parameter rules on the parameter. Defaults, ranges, pairing, and when-to-set rules belong in that parameter's description or schema; a description that varies with configuration usually means the varying part belongs to a parameter.
• Say each fact once. Do not repeat the tool definition in its system-prompt section, a parameter description in the tool description, or one tool's rules in another tool.
• Measure the change. Compare first-turn prompt tokens before and after a tool-definition change.