An agent becomes more useful when it has a clear job. Give it a purpose, the information it needs and a sensible boundary around what it may do.
That job can be small: turn notes into a clean draft, prepare a research brief or help plan a creative project. Start with a result you can recognize and review.
A good first agent
Create a writing partner that turns your notes into a short, plain-language draft. Keep it focused on drafting while you learn how its instructions, persona and model work together.
Choose one useful role
Open the agents workspace, create an agent and give it a name that helps you remember its purpose. A role such as “Newsletter editor” or “Research assistant” gives you a clearer starting point than asking one agent to handle everything.
Write its Instructions around the work: what it should produce, what information it may use and what a successful result looks like. Include important limits in direct language.
EXAMPLE ROLE INSTRUCTIONS
Turn my notes into a clear newsletter draft. Use only the facts I provide. Keep the language natural and specific. If an important fact is missing, ask a short question. Give me a draft to review and do not send or publish it.
This gives you a concrete task to test. You can see whether the draft uses your facts, follows the requested style and stays within the permission you gave it.
Give it a voice without burying the job
The optional Persona describes the agent’s voice, background and conversational character. Instructions describe its role. Keeping those purposes clear makes the agent easier to adjust.
For the newsletter editor, a short persona could say: “Calm, curious and direct. Prefer ordinary language, useful examples and short explanations.” You can refine it after seeing a few drafts.
Long lists of competing personality traits can make the result harder to judge. Start with a few qualities that matter to the work, then change what you actually notice.
Match its access to the task
A drafting assistant can work with the notes you supply. A researcher may need web access. An agent acting on a website may need its browser session and your permission for particular actions.
Enable the capabilities the job requires and understand what each one allows. Review approval requests before choosing a persistent permission. Permission to prepare something and permission to publish it are different steps in a workflow.
When the task involves an outside destination, check the account, the content and the action being requested. You can expand access after a small test has shown that the agent is doing the intended work.
Test the role with something real
Give the agent a short set of notes and ask for one draft. Review the result against its instructions:
- Did it use the information you supplied accurately?
- Did it invent details or repeat generic phrases?
- Is the tone close to what you wanted?
- Did it stop at the boundary you set?
Give concrete corrections. “Use the product’s actual name and remove the invented delivery date” is more useful than “Be better.” Save durable preferences in the agent’s memory when appropriate, and review or edit saved memories as your needs change.
Build toward recurring work
Once a single run is reliable, you can consider a saved or scheduled task. Keep the brief specific about what should happen, how often it should run and what should count as completion.
For a posting task, look for the published item at its destination. A draft is an earlier step. For research, check that the sources support the findings. Review the task’s activity and outcome rather than relying on a confident-sounding sentence alone.
Local scheduled work needs Naldar running and your Mac awake. Web-based work also needs an available connection. Choose a schedule your hardware can sustain and leave room for work that takes longer than expected.
The Agents overview shows other roles to explore. Build your first agent around one job you already understand, then use its actual results to decide what to add next.