# Delegating a task to an agent

> Write a brief, choose how much the agent may do on its own, and review the result against what you asked for.

Page: https://schubergphilis.github.io/ai-training/using-agents/delegating/
License: CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

In this lesson we delegate one small task to an agent and get a result
we can check. We write the brief and decide how much the agent may do
before it comes back to us. Then we review what it produced against the
brief rather than against a gut feeling. The task is deliberately small so
you can run it as often as you like and throw the results away.

You need any chat-capable agent you already have access to. The lesson
works with any product.

## The task

Here is the text you hand over. It is fictional; read it once now so
that you can judge the agent's work later.

> **Memo: office move, second floor to fourth floor**
>
> From next month the product team moves from the second floor to the
> fourth. Desks on the fourth floor are being fitted out over the next three
> weeks; the move itself is planned for the last Friday of the month, with
> everyone working from home that day. Facilities will label and transport
> monitors, chairs, and personal crates. Each person gets one crate and packs
> it by the Thursday evening before the move. Anything left on a desk after
> that's recycled. The printer on the second floor stays where it is; the
> fourth floor gets a new one in the week after the move. Lockers aren't
> moving, so clear yours before the end of the month. Questions go to the
> office manager, who will hold a short walk-through of the new floor next
> Tuesday at ten. Attendance is optional but recommended for anyone who
> keeps equipment at their desk.

The result you want is a one-page summary in this fixed format:

1. A one-line title.
2. A bullet each for what's happening, what you must do, and by when.
3. One closing line naming who to ask.

Before you write anything, predict: if you paste the memo and type
"summarize this", what do you get back? Probably a paragraph. Possibly a
decent one. Unlikely to be in this format, and you have no way to say
whether it is right except that it reads well. A brief is how you get the format and the check.

## Writing the brief

A brief has four parts: the goal, the context the work needs, the limits it
must stay within, and how you know it is done. The agent fills in
whatever you leave unsaid with plausible defaults, so what it must not do
matters as much as what it must do. "Summarize this" is a request but not a
brief.

Start with the goal and the limits together. The goal is the format above.
The limits are the things a helpful agent would otherwise do for you. It
might rephrase the dates or add advice the memo didn't give, or drop the
printer because it seemed minor. Write the limits as plain prohibitions.
A limit also has to mean the same thing to a second reader. "Keep the
printer part short" can mean trim the words or drop the printer, and the
agent picks one reading without telling you which. Where the two readings
lead to different work, write out the one you mean (Introduction to Claude Cowork, Claude Academy).

Now the context. Tell the agent which information to use and where it is.
Here that's easy: the memo, pasted in full, is the only source. State it
anyway. An agent that has to guess its sources picks the most available
one, not the right one, and "the latest information" is an invitation to
invent.

Last, the done-criteria, and write them before you send the task. Without
them you judge the result by feel and accept a plausible summary as a
correct one. Good done-criteria are things you can tick: every date in the
memo appears in the summary; no fact appears that's not in the memo; the
format has exactly the parts listed.

#### Checkpoint: Which of these can you tick?

You are writing the done-criteria for the memo summary. Which of these
lines are criteria you can tick?

Select exactly 3.

- Every date in the memo appears in the summary.
- The summary is clear and easy to read.
- No fact appears that is not in the memo.
- The output has exactly the five parts listed.
- The summary is about the right length.

Put together, the brief looks something like this. Send it to your agent
now, with the memo pasted underneath.

#### Prompt (illustrative, not a recorded transcript)

```text
Summarize the memo below into this exact format: a one-line title; three
bullets covering what's happening, what I must do, and by when; one closing
line naming who to ask.

Use only the memo as your source. Don't add advice, don't reword dates,
and don't leave out any deadline.

Done when: every date or deadline in the memo appears in the summary, no
fact appears that's not in the memo, and the output has exactly the five
lines described.

[memo follows]
```

#### Response

```text
**Product team moves to the fourth floor next month**

- The product team moves from the second to the fourth floor on the last
  Friday of the month. Everyone works from home that day.
- Pack your one crate and clear your locker; anything left on a desk is
  recycled.
- Crate packed by the Thursday evening before the move; locker cleared by
  the end of the month.

Questions go to the office manager, who holds a walk-through next Tuesday
at ten.
```

The response above is illustrative, written to show the structure of a good
result rather than recorded from one model, and your result differs in
wording. That's fine, because the brief fixed the structure and the facts
rather than the wording.

#### Checkpoint: Fix the brief

A colleague sends this to their agent and gets a friendly paragraph with a
made-up "see you on the new floor!" at the end. Rewrite the brief so it
states goal, context, limits and done-criteria.

```text
Can you make a short summary of the office move memo for the team? Keep it clear.
```

#### Pitfall: Trusting the agent to know what 'done' means

A learner sends "summarize the memo, keep it short" and gets three tidy
bullets that omit the locker deadline. The summary reads well, so they
forward it, and half the team loses the contents of their locker. Nothing in
the brief said every deadline had to survive, so the agent optimized for
short. The rule: write the done-criteria before you send the task and make them
things you can tick rather than adjectives.

## Choosing autonomy

A brief says what to do. It doesn't yet say which actions the agent may take
before it checks in with you. For a summary that's barely a question; the
agent writes, you read. For anything that touches the world (sending,
deleting, paying, publishing) it is the main question.

That's the agent's **degree of autonomy**, and three settings cover most
tasks. At the first, **the human decides**: the agent gathers or drafts,
and you take every action yourself. At the second, **the agent proposes and
the human approves**: it prepares the action and waits for a yes before
taking it. At the third, **the agent acts and the human reviews after**: it
takes the action and you check the outcome.

The degree to pick depends on two things: how bad a wrong action is, and
how easy it is to undo. Drafting the summary is cheap and reversible, so the
agent acts and you review after. Emailing that summary to the whole team is
cheap to do but awkward to take back, so the agent proposes and you approve.
Deciding which desks people get is a judgment about people, so you decide,
with the agent at most laying out the options.

Those two questions set the degree you are working toward. For the first
runs of a new kind of task, sit one step below it, and move up once a few
results have passed review without surprises. A run that goes wrong one
step below costs you one review. The same run at the degree you were aiming
for costs you the cleanup (Introduction to Claude Cowork, Claude Academy).

Try it: rerun the task, but this time add one line to the brief that sets
the degree. For example, "Draft the summary, then stop and show it to me
before doing anything else." Notice that the agent behaves differently even
though the task didn't change.

#### Checkpoint: Who decides?

Buckets:

- Human decides
- Agent proposes, human approves
- Agent acts, human reviews after

Items:

- Draft a summary of a memo for you to read
- Send that summary to the whole team by email
- Decide which colleague gets the window desk
- Sort your inbox into folders you can move things out of
- Book a meeting room and invite twelve people
- Delete last year's files from the shared drive
- Tell a colleague their request has been turned down
- Rename a folder of your own photos by date

## Reviewing against the brief

You now have a summary in front of you. The temptation is to read it, feel
that it is fine, and move on. Do not review by feel. Review by taking the
done-criteria you wrote and ticking them one by one.

Go back to your agent's output and check it against the brief right now:
Does it have exactly the five parts? Is the Thursday crate deadline there?
The end-of-month locker deadline? The move on the last Friday? The
Tuesday walk-through? Is there any sentence that is not in the memo? Write
down which criteria fail, if any.

Most agents will pass most of these on the first try. The ones that fail are
usually the same ones: a deadline folded into a vaguer phrase, or a helpful
addition ("bring a box for anything that does not fit") that the memo never
said. Both read as perfectly reasonable, which is exactly why a review by
feeling would have missed them.

When a criterion fails, the fix is not to rewrite the summary yourself. Send
the failing criterion back: "The locker deadline is missing; add it and
change nothing else." Then check again. Reviewing against the brief gives
you a precise thing to say, and the agent a precise thing to do.

A failure also tells you something about the brief. If the same criterion
fails on the second try, the brief left a gap. One agent asks about the gap
before it starts, and another fills it with a guess, and either way the gap
is yours to close (Introduction to Claude Cowork, Claude Academy). Close it in the
brief itself. The next task then starts from a better one. The brief gives the
review something to check, and the review shows what the next brief has to
say (AI Fluency: Framework and foundations, Claude Academy).

#### Checkpoint: Which review is a review?

The agent returns a summary of the memo. Which of these is a review against
the brief?

- Read it through; it sounds right and the tone is good, so accept it.
- Check each done-criterion from the brief and note which pass and which fail.
- Compare it to a summary you would have written yourself and accept it if they are similar.
- Ask the agent whether it met the brief and accept its answer.

## Exercise

Pick a short text of your own that you do not mind sharing with an agent:
a newsletter, a notice, a set of meeting notes. Write a brief for a
one-page summary of it with all four parts (goal, context, limits,
done-criteria), add one line that sets the degree of autonomy, and send it.
Then review the result by ticking each done-criterion. A good result is
one where you can name every criterion that passed and every one that
failed without rereading the whole summary, and where any failure turns
into a one-sentence follow-up to the agent.

Stretch: Now delegate the same memo with the wrong format on purpose (a paragraph, no bullets) and see whether your done-criteria still catch a missing deadline.

## Recap

1. A brief has four parts: goal, context, limits, done-criteria. What the agent must not do matters as much as what it must do.
2. Name the source the agent should use. An agent that guesses picks the most available source, not the right one.
3. Write the done-criteria before sending the task, as things you can tick rather than adjectives.
4. Choose the degree of autonomy by how bad a wrong action is and how easily it is undone: human decides, agent proposes and human approves, or agent acts and human reviews after. For the first runs of a new kind of task, sit one step below that degree and move up as reviewed results pass.
5. Review against the brief, criterion by criterion. A result that reads well has told you nothing yet.
6. When a criterion fails, send that criterion back rather than fixing the output yourself, and close the gap in the brief before the next task.

## References

- Introduction to Claude Cowork, Claude Academy, https://academy.claude.com/courses/introduction-to-claude-cowork
- AI Fluency: Framework and foundations, Claude Academy, https://academy.claude.com/courses/ai-fluency-framework-foundations