Lesson Overview

An AI agent without a prompt is like a worker without instructions: it has tools and information, but no idea how to start. This lesson explains how to write a prompt that gives your agent all the direction it needs. By including the right elements—such as its role, task, input, available tools, rules, and expected output—you can guide your agent to perform specific tasks more reliably.

Writing clear prompts is central to building functional agents in any workflow. This lesson fits into the larger process of setting up your AI agent, coming right after you’ve given it access to the tools it needs. Whether you’re automating a business process, creating a customer support assistant, or experimenting with AI-driven projects, a strong prompt is key to getting useful, repeatable results.

Having a structured way to write prompts—such as using ChatGPT to draft one based on your project’s requirements—saves time and helps avoid confusion. Checking the generated prompt before using it ensures your agent is ready to carry out its purpose, no matter the context.

Who This Is For

If you’re at the stage where your agent is set up with tools but needs clear direction, this lesson will help. Writing agent prompts is useful for:

• Developers building custom AI automations
• Business professionals setting up workflow assistants
• Educators creating instructional bots
• Product teams defining automated support agents
• Anyone seeking clear, reliable results from AI tasks

Where This Fits in a Workflow

This lesson is a key part of the agent setup process, coming after you’ve connected the tools your agent can use. Writing the prompt transforms your agent from a passive setup into an actionable assistant. For example, after linking your agent to a data source and action steps, you’ll define what it should actually do—such as summarizing information, answering questions, or creating documents.

A well-written prompt means you can trust the agent to consistently carry out assignments as intended. In real work settings, this step ensures accuracy and reduces the need to manually correct agent errors later on.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Manually guiding an agent through each step is time-consuming and can lead to inconsistent results. By writing a clear, structured prompt that lays out the agent’s role, task, and boundaries, you remove ambiguity and improve performance. Using tools like ChatGPT for generating your prompt helps standardize the way you give instructions, making it easier to reuse or adapt for similar agents in the future.

In practice, this approach increases the quality of your agent’s output and saves time in troubleshooting. For instance, a customer support agent with a detailed prompt will respond more helpfully than one with vague guidance. This method brings efficiency and consistency whether you’re scaling processes or automating one-off tasks.

Practice Exercise

Try applying this method by setting up a sample agent scenario:

1. Choose a simple project, such as an agent that summarizes support tickets.
2. Ask ChatGPT to write a structured prompt including the agent’s role, main task, accessible input data, allowed tools, constraints, and the expected type of summary as output.
3. Review the generated prompt. Paste it into your agent’s configuration, and consider if you need to add or change any parts.

Reflection: How does the quality of results change when you update or clarify different parts of your prompt?

Course Context Recap

This lesson follows your previous work of giving the agent tool access, and now focuses on telling it exactly what to do. Writing an effective prompt is one of the final steps before running your AI agent live. Up next, the course will cover actually running the agent and reviewing its results. To continue building useful AI agents, keep exploring the rest of the course for more practical steps and tips.