02 / recommendation

28 Nov 2024

I would say that as people are building systems around agents, I think the more you can separate out the different kinds of work the agent needs to do, the better you can tailor a prompt for that task. And I think that also creates a lot of like, for instance, if you were trying to make an agent that could both solve hard programming tasks, and it could just write quick test files for something that someone else had already made, the best way to do those two tasks might be very different prompts.

“I would say that as people are building systems around agents, I think the more you can separate out the different kinds of work the agent needs to do, the better you can tailor a prompt for that task. And I think that also creates a lot of like, for instance, if you were trying to make an agent that could both solve hard programming tasks, and it could just write quick test files for something that someone else had already made, the best way to do those two tasks might be very different prompts.”

Speaker: Erik Schluntz
Episode: The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Computer Use, and Building SOTA Agents — with Erik Schluntz, Anthropic
Publisher: Latent Space

Erik Schluntz

What Erik said.

I think for agents in general, like having a planning step at the beginning, one, just having that plan will improve performance on the downstream task just because it's kind of like a bigger chain of thought, but also it's just such a better UX.