Agentic
The Conductor Prompt: Ten Specialist Roles, Five Workers in Flight
A catalog, a task packet, and a fail-closed ledger, not a project-manager persona
Brian Gagne
Author
Brian Gagne
CTO, Kief Studio
CTO of Kief Studio. 20+ years technology consulting. Cisco Certified Ethical Hacker, UPenn AI for Business, Perplexity AI Business Fellow. Builds the tools Qurtoo teaches you to use.
75 articleskief.studio
Articles by Brian Gagne
TechniquesPrompt Caching and Reuse: Design Prompts That Actually Hit the Cache at Scale
Cached input bills at a fraction of the normal rate, but only for a byte-identical prefix. How to order tools, system prompts and agent history so the cache hits on every call.
Brian Gagne
AgenticBackground Agents and Parallel Execution: Run Eight Tasks at Once Without Conflicts
The orchestration patterns behind Cursor's parallel agents and Claude Code's background tasks
Brian Gagne
TechniquesXML Tags Are the New Markdown: Why Closed Delimiters Beat Free-Form Prompts
The delimiter strategy that Claude, GPT, and Gemini all respond to better than plain English sections
Brian Gagne
AgenticMCP Server Design: Build Tool Interfaces That Agents Actually Use Correctly
Model Context Protocol is the new API layer for AI agents. Here's how to design tools that don't confuse them
Brian Gagne
TechniquesGrounding Prompts With Retrieved Context: The RAG Prompt Patterns That Stop Invented Answers
Stop bolting retrieval onto bad prompts. Design prompts that actually use retrieved context correctly
Brian Gagne
AgenticYour Agent Skips Step 3 Every Time: Stop Describing Your Procedure and Verify Its Trace Instead
Turn your workflow's "always do X before Y" rules into machine-checkable invariants that catch out-of-order tool calls before they cause damage.
Brian Gagne
TechniquesGPT-5.6 Pays You to Delete Your System Prompt: State Every Rule Once and Stop Repeating Yourself
OpenAI's own tests show trimming duplicated instructions raises scores 10-15% while cutting tokens up to 66%. Your old scaffolding is now a tax.
Brian Gagne
AgenticMagentic Just Hit 1.0, and Your Whole Agent Team Lives or Dies by the Manager's Ledger Prompt
Microsoft Agent Framework's magentic pattern lets a manager invent the workflow at runtime. Here's the ledger prompt that makes it converge instead of loop forever.
Brian Gagne
TechniquesChain-of-Thought Is Sabotaging Your Model's Sense of Direction: Prompt Grids as Symbols, Not Sentences
Seventeen models, thirteen spatial benchmarks, one verdict: "think step by step" makes maps, mazes, and layouts worse. Here's what to send instead.
Brian Gagne
AgenticYour Agent's 'Done' Is a Lie: Gate Completion on Disk Evidence, Not Its Final Message
Steal the validation-gated completion pattern from July 2026's Paper-replication skill and make every agent attach a receipt before it stops.
Brian Gagne
AgenticYour Agent's Planner Is Fine. Its Aggregator Is What's Broken
ROMA hit state-of-the-art on SealQA by compressing every subtask tree before it bubbles up. Here are the four node prompts you can copy without adopting the framework.
Brian Gagne