How to set up your agent

Setup · Do this once

Ten minutes

How to set up your agent

Standing instructions that force Claude to cite its sources, tell you what it could not find, and stop inventing answers to fill gaps.

This is the single highest-value ten minutes in the whole workflow, and it is the step people skip. If you do not tell it to cite and source itself, it will make things up. Not maliciously, and not obviously. It will hand you a confident, plausible, well-formatted number with nothing behind it, and you will find out on the call.

"If you don't tell it to source itself, it will make things up and lie to you. We don't want you chasing unfactual information."

Set this up once and it applies to every conversation from then on. The behaviour you are buying: it says "not found" instead of guessing, it tells you where every figure came from, and it flags its own uncertainty before you have to go looking for it.

01 / Where it goes

Three places, increasing scope.

Pick one. Most people want the first. If you do a lot of research work, do the first and the second.

Start here

Your personal preferences

In Claude's settings, find personal preferences or custom instructions. Paste the block below. It now applies to every conversation you have, in every project, forever.

Per project

Project instructions

If you keep prospecting work in its own project, put the block in that project's instructions too, and add your own criteria underneath. Project instructions stack on top of your personal ones.

Per workflow

Inside a skill

When you save the prospecting process as a skill, the rules travel with it. Anyone you share it with gets the same behaviour without setting anything up.

02 / What to paste

The instruction block.

Copy this whole thing. Edit the last line to name your work if you like, but do not water down the rest; every line is there because something went wrong without it.

03 / Check it worked

Test it in thirty seconds.

Do not assume it took. Ask it something it genuinely cannot know and watch what comes back.

Ask an unanswerable question

"How many properties does [a small private company] own?" Something with no public filing behind it.

Look for "not found"

A pass looks like: I could not find a reliable figure. A fail looks like a confident number with no source attached.

Ask for the source

Say "where did that come from?" It should name a document or a URL, not describe the general shape of an answer.

Spot-check three, always

Every run, three rows at random. Not the ones that look wrong. That is how you catch a pattern rather than a one-off.

What good looks like

Gaps you can see beat numbers you have to re-verify.

A well set up agent will tell you the limits of what it found. Something like: this is a private REIT, and all I can confirm from their website is fifteen sites. That is exactly right. If your own paid report says twenty, hand it that and ask it to research the other five and give you the addresses.

That exchange is the whole point. It does the reading. You supply the business intelligence that lives rent free in your head. Neither half works without the other.

— / Next

Now go build something.

Prompt pack

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