Behind the Craft · Sunday, August 9, 2026
When working with AI agents, the advice is to provide minimal instructions to achieve optimal results. Over-prompting can degrade performance. Instead of feeding the agent all necessary context upfront, it's suggested to give it the tools to load its own context, allowing it to iteratively build the necessary information.
“The models are really smart, but we're just not using them enough.”
“If you over prompt these things, you're more likely than not going to make it worse.”
“Give it as little instruction as possible.”
“Give it the tool to load context, don't give it context.”