The progressive shaping of an agent’s behaviour to match the actor’s evolving needs, transforming a generic capability into a personalised collaborator.
Filters
A correction that keeps recurring is escalated into a standing rule — a trigger, the exceptions to it, and the constraints on what the agent may do in response. Composing that rule, and checking what it will do before saving it, is rule composition; the escalation from the per-case exception (“never this one again”) to the general rule is described there too.
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Parameters
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Voice and tone
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References
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Workflow
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Consequences
- the standing behaviour is the actor's to shape, so a correction made once holds across sessions instead of being re-issued each time
- how far the system may act on its own is now something the actor set, which moves the responsibility for that boundary onto them
- tuning accumulates and then goes quiet: behaviour configured months ago reads later as simply how the system is, including to the actor who configured it
Resources & references
Appears in
Delegating work
- Correcting the result, step 2 — Turn a repeated correction into a standing rule
Related patterns
Serves
- Delegation — shaping initial behaviours at delegation's set-up, and repairing misfires during exception handling
Enacts
- Agency — the actor sets how far the system can act on its own, then lets it run
Complements
- Localization — locale as a generation parameter
- Generated content — settings that influence how content is generated and presented.
- Selective memory — remembered facts and shaped behaviour are two channels of the same persistence
- Settings — specialized settings for configuring AI behaviour
- Workflow — a workflow builder is a tuning tool: editing the procedure is one of the ways an agent's behaviour gets progressively shaped
Related to
Preceded by
Enabled by
- Rule composition — the tuning that survives the session is written as a rule, which is the form the correction takes