Articles · AI agent deep dives
10 principles for high-quality agent system prompts
Not the "act as an expert" cliché. These are lessons from agents that actually ship in production.
Kition Team·Feb 24, 2026·1 min read
10 principles
- Clearly define role and boundaries ("you are a writing assistant, not legal counsel")
- Enumerate available tools and when to call each
- Add confirmation gates for destructive operations
- Constrain reply format ("plan, then act, then 1-paragraph summary")
- Provide 1-2 full example dialogues
- State hard nos explicitly ("never force-push")
- Ask the user when uncertain — do not guess
- Fail-safes belong in the prompt ("stop after 3 tool failures and report")
- Keep it under ~8K tokens; everything else is lower priority
- Test, iterate, and version your prompt