points by XenophileJKO 1 day ago | 0 comments
This is still generally a good rule when building with agents, the models are capable of many behaviors. The key is to simply set some bounds on what their "job" is so that most of their finite attention can be spent organizing around the what that role is expected to do.
It certainly is less important as the models get better at meta planning, but this approach is still very useful.
Often all you need to do is define a set of beliefs and values for the role and it will operate much better than rules or guidance.
Adaptive Auto-Harness: Sustained Self-Improvement for Agentic System Deployment on Open-Ended Task Stream (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.01770) talks about this and the efficacy of role- and objective-based agents on unbounded streams of heterogeneous tasks.
I recently wrote down some of my own experience with this: LARPing with Agents (and Why It Works) (https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2026/10/larping-with-agents-and-wh...) after someone called out my role-based agents as "larping". Short of it: role-based, fully "JIT" agents have increased autonomy in my coding workflows end-to-end. I get very good outputs with few skills required and less human instruction input.