Roles and Specialization
Designing agent personas.
Why Specialize Agents
A single generalist prompt juggling many concerns dilutes attention and conflates instructions. Decomposing a task into specialized agents — each with a narrow mandate, focused context, and tailored tools — sharpens behavior and isolates failure.
- Narrow scope -> more reliable, more steerable.
- Isolation -> a mistake in one role does not corrupt the others.
Specialization is divide-and-conquer applied to prompting.
Anatomy of a Persona
An effective agent persona is more than a name. It declares: a mandate (what it owns), boundaries (what it must not do), inputs/outputs (its contract), and success criteria. Vague personas ('you are a helpful expert') under-constrain behavior.
persona = {
'role': 'Researcher',
'mandate': 'Gather and cite primary sources for the question.',
'forbidden': 'Do not draw final conclusions; do not write prose.',
'output': 'JSON list of {claim, source_url, confidence}.'
}All lessons in this course
- Roles and Specialization
- Orchestrator and Workers
- Inter-Agent Communication
- Debating and Voting Agents