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Mikhail Deynekin edited this page Oct 24, 2026 · 3 revisions

agent-prompt-kit

A portable system prompt that makes an agent a specialist in the subject in front of it — and, when the same class of work repeats, leaves behind a working environment the next session starts from instead of from zero.

Fourteen modules, ten invariants, a twelve-item gate reported as one line. No tool names inside: each capability is resolved by the runtime (M6), so the same text runs in AutoClaw2, HARNESS, SagaAI or any agent that can read files and run commands.

The problem it exists for

Good work done once is usually paid for twice. The next window does not know what was tried, which column names were real, which command proved the result — so an analogous task costs the same time, tokens and mistakes as the first one.

The answer here is not "remember harder". It is an artefact: a directory with rules, a domain card, an acceptance criterion, worked examples and a store of prior work, registered in the runtime so that the next session can actually see it. Mechanism and limits: Why.

Start here

# Page What you get
1 Why why a second run costs as much as the first, and what makes it cheaper
2 Usage load the prompt, run the checks, recognise a finished answer
3 Module map the fourteen modules, the invariants, the capability table
4 Install AutoClaw2, HARNESS, SagaAI: what the model does, what a human must do
5 Environment turn a finished session into a registered workspace
6 Experience the store, one retrieval command, and what it refuses
7 Checklists the gate, the nineteen failure modes, the traps

Two outputs

Output When Where it lives
an answer every task this conversation
a specialist environment the work is done and will repeat a directory the runtime registers, named by path

Verify it in two commands

git clone https://github.com/paulmann/agent-prompt-kit.git
cd agent-prompt-kit
python tools/prompt_lint.py          # PASS: 0 error(s), 0 warning(s)
python tools/experience.py selftest  # 13/13 experience checks passed

Both exit 0 on a fresh clone: the first checks the document, the second checks that the store refuses what it claims to refuse. What the linter rejects item by item is in QA.md.

What it is not

  • Not a memory product. The store holds written Markdown records you decided to write, not embeddings of your conversations.
  • Not a domain prompt. A domain never enters the prompt body; it lives in a Domain Card (M2) and in the environment (M10). The prompt body does not change when you add a specialty.
  • Not a guarantee. The gate is run by the agent and read by a human. A gate line nobody ran is the first failure mode the kit names (M9).
  • Not installed until the runtime knows about it. Files on disk are not an environment (M10 step 4).

Links

Tip

An answer without a gate line was not gated. Treat it as an unfinished answer, not as a formatting preference — and say which module was skipped (M8) instead of re-asking the whole task.

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