01Define the job
A plain statement of what the agent is responsible for and what stays firmly with a person, so nobody is surprised later.
Pin down exactly what the agent must do
Capabilities
Everything included, nothing bolted on after the fact.
- Scope and responsibility definition
- Guardrails and hard limits
- Input and output specification
- Success and quality criteria
- Edge case and refusal handling
- Data and access requirements
- Acceptance criteria up front
- Shared, sign off ready spec
Every build starts with a fixed-scope conversation, no surprise line items after the fact.
The build itself, not a proof of concept.
02Set the boundaries
The hard limits an agent must respect, the actions that always need a human, and the cases it should refuse rather than guess.
03Describe good output
Concrete examples of a right answer and a wrong one, so quality is something we can test against rather than argue about.
04Agree how we measure it
Clear acceptance criteria set before the build, so everyone knows what done and working actually means.
FAQ
We define the job the agent is responsible for, set the hard boundaries it must respect, describe what good output looks like with concrete examples, and agree the acceptance criteria up front.
No. A rough idea is enough. The point is turning that rough idea into a precise definition of what the agent handles, what it must never do, and how success gets measured.
A brief is usually vague scope, which is where AI projects quietly go wrong. This sets hard limits, refusal cases and concrete right and wrong output examples that can actually be tested against.
The build starts from the shared, sign off ready spec, so what ships matches what was pictured and there is a clear line for what counts as done and working.
Interested in solving your problems with requirements definition?
Tell us what you are trying to do and we will reply with how we would build it, no obligation.
The build starts from a spec everyone has agreed, so what we ship matches what you pictured and there is a clear line for what counts as working.
Let’s talkWas this helpful?
Thanks, that helps.