Promoting your Agents
As a manager, a lot of my team was spent on getting people promoted. Getting the right project, right visibility, right timing. The other half was making it clear to each team member, what does operating at the next level look like.
When it comes to AI, I think a lot of people would benefit from “promoting” their Agents.
From engineers to senior management, when is ask how AI helps you, they’ll say it helped me design something, build something, fix something, get information about something, take out some burning fire.
Tasks.
Promoting an AI means giving it a larger scope. Instead of fixing an issue - owning a feature area. Instead of sending a message, owning a relationship. Instead of helping write something, coaching you to be a better communicator.
An example “promoted” agent looks like this. It “owns” shipping a product end to end. It has all the context about the product, the timelines, all the profiles of the people involved, all the profiles of the team involved, all the relationships, components, dependencies. All the success metrics, and more.
It has access to status - emails, slack messages, meeting notes, work records, commits, PRs, service health.
Then every day, it asks - What are the next 3 things that need to happen to “ship” the product
This is its core loop. From the 3 things, maybe it needs something from you. Maybe it needs a follow up from another team. Maybe it needs to write some code. Maybe it needs to investigate some failure log. Maybe research and update its context. Maybe write skills for operations.
What it does is secondary to the fact that every day, the same question will be asked - what are the next 3 things.
Now you have an Agent with ownership. Its less of do-er and more of an owner.
How to set this up
Ask your current agent -
Write me a skill called /bootstrap-project. This skill should take a project name and find out everything about it. If you have /grill-me, use it. Make sure to include dates, plans, people, components, metrics, goals, and more. Save everything to a folder. An agent will own this project and its delivery end to end. Make sure the role of the agent in this project is clear.
Then use /bootstrap-project and run /bootstrap-project Ship X by October
Ask your current agent -
Write me a skill called /next-three-things project name. This skill takes a project name, updates all the status of it, and suggest the next 3 things needed to move it forward. If any of the items it can do independently, run them after suggesting them. If anything needs clarification but with clarification it can run independently, ask. If anything is blocked, make it clear what I need to do. If anything is for me to do, tell me. If anything needs someone else to do it, give me the follow up message. Optional : Send a rich html report to my email with the results of this (after you completed the independent tasks)
Then run /next-three-things Ship X every day. You can go fancy with loops and all, but this is more than enough to get your Agent promoted.
From Prompting to Promoting,
Ibrahim