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The system prompt is the single highest-leverage thing you can change about your agent. A good one makes the difference between answers your customers love and answers that make you wince.

Anatomy of a good prompt

A working prompt has four parts, in this order:
  1. Identity — who the agent is.
  2. Voice — how it speaks.
  3. Scope — what it’s allowed to talk about.
  4. Rules — what it must never do.

Template

Copy this, fill in the bold bits:
That’s ~150 words. Don’t go much longer — most of the value is in the first three sentences.

What goes where

Common mistakes

  • Giving it facts instead of instructions. “We ship in 3–5 days” belongs in Knowledge, not the prompt. The prompt tells the agent how to behave; knowledge tells it what’s true.
  • Too many rules. After ~10 rules the model starts ignoring some. Prioritise.
  • Ambiguous voice. “Friendly but professional but playful but concise” → confused replies. Pick two.
  • Forgetting the handoff clause. Always say what to do when it doesn’t know.

Tuning temperature

Under Advanced, temperature controls creativity:

Iterate with the Try panel

Don’t guess whether your prompt works. Open AI agents → Try and chat with the agent like a customer would. Paste real past questions. When you catch a bad answer, tweak the prompt, try again — 5 minutes of that is worth more than an hour of speculating. See Test an agent.