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Recipes

Specialist Agents

Design domain agents that are safer and easier to reason about than one giant assistant.

Specialist agents should own a narrow domain and a small tool set.

Example domains

  • Sales: prospects, duplicate checks, CRM intake, follow-up
  • Delivery: projects, initiatives, task plans, scope breakdown
  • Operations: time summaries, initiative health, bottleneck analysis
  • Knowledge: Drive search, folder context, documentation organization

Tool progression

Add capabilities in this order:

  1. read/search tools
  2. context tools for one record
  3. draft/planning tools if needed
  4. write tools with confirmation and audit metadata

Instruction checklist

For each specialist, document:

  • role and boundaries
  • exact tool-use rules
  • required lookup/check before mutations
  • what to do when a duplicate or ambiguity exists
  • answer format for common tasks

Model guidance

Use cheaper/faster models for routing and summarization. Use stronger reasoning models for specialists that make judgment calls around data integrity, planning, or ambiguous business context.

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