Learning 03 · 1 min read
Give agents the context you’d give a new hire
Agents fail the same way new joiners do: missing context. So we wrote it down once, for both.
Context is the real bottleneck
Anthropic’s own guidance is that an agent’s context fills up fast and quality drops as it does, so the context you give it must be short and precise.
What we wrote down
A short project brief for agents, a glossary of business terms, decision records that explain why things are the way they are, and a feature map that says where each feature lives in the code. The feature map is checked automatically, so it cannot quietly drift out of date.
The side effect
New engineers onboard faster too. The same documents that steer the agents answer the questions people used to ask in chat.