Give the Agent the Source, Not Your Summary of It

When people brief an agent, they often do it the way they'd brief a person in a hallway. They summarize. They leave out the parts that feel obvious. They pass along the gist.

That works all right with a person who can ask you a question in the next breath, and who already shares some of the context. It works less well with an agent. The agent only has what you put in front of it. If you replaced the source with your summary, the missing pieces don't look like holes. They just aren't there.

So here's a simple rule I use: when the facts already exist in writing, give the agent that writing. Don't replace it with your memory of it.

What goes wrong when you summarize

Say a coordinator sends you a short note:

Saturday's tool-share is moving from the upstairs workroom to the basement bay. Doors open at 9, not 10. Bring your own eye protection. The sign-up sheet on the door is out of date — ignore it and use the one I attached.

You need a plain notice to put where people will see it.

A hallway summary sounds like this: "Write a short notice that the tool-share moved and it starts earlier now."

That sentence is true. It is also missing the new room, the old room, the two times, the eye protection, and the bit about the wrong sign-up sheet. An agent that only sees your summary has to invent, skip, or ask. If it invents, the notice will sound finished and still be wrong. If it skips, people will show up in the wrong place or at the wrong time.

I wrote about how to catch those invented facts after the fact: https://johndclay.com/blog/check-an-si-draft

This post is about not creating so many of them in the first place.

What I give the agent instead

I paste the original note, and then I say what I want done with it.

Something like: "Here's the coordinator's note, quoted in full. Write a short public notice based only on this. If something isn't in the note, leave it out. Don't add a welcome, a joke, or a reason for the move unless the note has one."

Now the agent can see the upstairs workroom, the basement bay, 9 instead of 10, the eye protection, and the outdated sheet. It doesn't have to recover those from my memory.

The instruction at the end matters as much as the paste. "Based only on this" tells it not to fill gaps. "Leave it out" is clearer than telling it not to make things up, which is easy to agree with and hard to apply.

A second case: a page you want shortened

The same thing happens when you ask for a shorter version of something you've already written, or of a page that already exists.

"Summarize my book page" forces the agent to work from whatever it already believes about the book, or from a blurry memory of a page it may never have seen. "Here is the book page text. Cut it to 120 words. Don't add a line that isn't already here" gives it the only source that counts.

I don't ask an agent to describe a page I haven't shown it. If the words are mine, I paste them. If they're on a public page, I paste them, or I paste the exact excerpt I want used. I don't say "you know the one."

What still belongs to you

Pasting the source does not mean the agent should decide the point of the piece.

You still choose the job: a notice, a shorter page, a list of leftover questions, a check against a claim. You still choose the limits: how long, who it's for, what to leave out. And you still read the result.

The source answers "what are the facts." It does not answer "what is this for." If you skip that second part, you can get a faithful copy of the wrong kind of writing.

A handy test: if you deleted your own sentences and left only the pasted source, could the agent still see the facts? If yes, you briefed it cleanly. If no, you asked it to trust your memory.

When a summary is the right thing

Sometimes the source is huge, or messy, or full of things the agent should not see. Then a summary is a filter, not a shortcut. In that case, write the summary as a list of facts you are willing to stand behind, and say that it is your summary, not the original. Don't pretend the agent has the source when it doesn't.

If a number, a name, a time, or a quote matters, it has to appear in what you paste. "It's around the usual time" is not a time.

The short version

If the facts already exist in writing, paste that writing. Say what you want made from it. Say that anything not in the source should be left out.

You'll still need to read what comes back. A clean briefing does not replace a check. It just means the check starts with fewer holes.

I keep longer reported pieces on the articles page: https://johndclay.com/articles

If you want the book this site is built around, the page for Shadows of the Forgotten is here: https://johndclay.com/books/shadows-of-the-forgotten