Anthropic has released some recordings from their Code w/ Claude event in May and the Prompting for Agents presentation’s “key principles” are basically to empathise with your agent, imagine it’s a brilliant new grad, book smart but missing all things practical at their first job: You need clear concepts, unambiguous instructions, and well-named and designed tools.

I’m more than a little amused that we’re basically coming to a point where, if things pan out with the genies, then the best wranglers will be the ones that can empathise the most with others. Then again, I always thought the brilliant asshole was the exception, they only survive if they’re in charge or are legacy to the company. And sitting in on the review meetings at work… it’s definitely the ones that help the team that we like the most, even if we sometimes need to push them to have their name on something so people don’t overlook them.