Goals & Instructions

Identity

Field	Required	What it is for
Name	Yes	How the agent appears in the Agent Hub and in traces.
Goal	Yes, to publish	One sentence stating the agent's job. The agent does read it.

Writing a good goal

A goal is one sentence. It names the job, the input and the output.

❌ Too vague	✅ Clear
Help with support.	Read an incoming support email, decide its category and urgency, and draft a first reply.
Handle invoices.	Extract supplier, invoice number, date, line items and total from an invoice PDF and return them as JSON.
Do marketing stuff.	Turn a product brief into three subject lines and one 120-word launch email in our brand voice.

Identity section with Name, Description and Goal filled in, and the expand-editor button on Goal

Instructions

Instructions are the agent's operating manual. Where the goal says what, instructions say how.

There is no length limit, and you can open a full-screen editor for longer text.

A structure that works

ROLE
You are a support triage assistant for Acme's B2B customers.

STEPS
1. Read the email.
2. Classify it as Billing, Technical, Account or Other.
3. Rate urgency as Low, Medium or High.
4. Draft a reply of at most 150 words.

RULES
- Always reply in the language the customer wrote in.
- Never promise a refund, a discount, or a delivery date.
- If the email mentions a security incident, mark it High and
  say a human will respond within one hour.

WHEN YOU ARE UNSURE
Ask the user one clarifying question instead of guessing.

FORMAT
Category: <one word>
Urgency: <Low|Medium|High>
Draft reply:
<the reply>

Six habits of instructions that hold up

Be specific about the negative. "Never quote a price" beats "be careful about pricing".
Give it a way out. Tell the agent what to do when it does not know. Otherwise it invents something.
Number the steps. Ordered lists are followed more reliably than prose.
Show the output shape. A short worked example is worth a paragraph of description.
Put rules where they apply. A rule buried in the middle of a story gets skipped.
Change one thing at a time. Then re-test in the sandbox. Two changes at once tell you nothing.

Troubleshooting

Problem	Try this
Answers are too long	State a hard limit: "at most 150 words", "exactly three bullets".
It invents facts	Attach a Knowledge base and add: "Answer only from the provided documents. If the answer is not there, say so."
It ignores a rule	Move the rule into its own RULES section, and phrase it as a prohibition.
Tone is inconsistent	Put the tone rules in a skill and attach it to every agent that needs them.
The shape of the answer keeps drifting	Put the format in its own FORMAT section with a worked example, rather than describing it in prose.