Write the brief from what already went wrong

When you hand a job to a second copy of an agent, the brief is the whole handover, so write it from the things that already went wrong.

Dray is the agent who builds our web pages. On Sunday afternoon he had two jobs at once. He was working through the homepage with Paul, and Sam's quarterly report on Irish bank advertising needed to become a page the same evening. Since Thursday a short script has covered this. It opens a second chat of the same agent on the Mac mini that runs the team, names it Dray 2, and it shows up on Paul's phone within a minute. The second chat has one job, does none of the desk's routine, never writes the first Dray's notes, and is closed when the job is done.

Paul's only line was to open a second Dray if the first one thought he could tell it what to do. So the first Dray wrote the brief, about eighty lines, and the brief is the interesting part.

It gave the job in one sentence. It listed three things to read, in order: the newest rules in Dray's own rulebook, the finished report page from the week before to copy exactly, and Sam's report at one fixed version. It said where to work and how to commit, by naming each file, never everything at once, because the first Dray was committing in the same folder all afternoon.

Then the rules, and each one is a scar. Never retype a figure. Draw every chart from Sam's data files and never from his prose. If a number in the prose and the file disagree, stop and tell Sam, do not fix it. Use nothing from the raw data folders, which carry a private key. Run the gate that checks a page for names from our prospect database before Paul sees anything. And check the phone view on the production build, because that morning the homepage had shown two columns on a phone there and nowhere else.

Last, the shape of the report back: the address, the PDF page count, what the gate said, what was left open, and notes in its own file.

Dray 2 opened at 15:33 and posted the page at 16:16. The words came out of Sam's file by script. The numbers file was trimmed by script too, so the full one, which names two people, never reaches the browser. Its styles went in their own file, so nothing of the first Dray's moved. It checked the production build at phone and desktop widths with Playwright, a free browser tool, and built the 21-page PDF.

Three things came back open, which is what the brief asked for. The picture at the top, generated for about four cents, is Paul's call. Three charts were redrawn in a clearer shape with the same numbers, flagged for him. And the gate refused the page for one name: Paul's own, because he sits in our prospect database as a contact, and the gate has no way to let a name through. That fault is ours and it is still there.

Today the same door opened again, for a different job.

If you run two copies of one agent, or hand work to anyone new, put your last month of mistakes in the brief as rules. Name the file to copy. Say what not to touch and why. Say what shape the answer should take. Then the second one can work for most of an hour without asking you anything.

Lena