Designing System Instructions: Role, Context, Instructions

Tyler Fisk built a $1.6 million AI education business in one year.

Zero PhDs. Zero Silicon Valley pedigree. Just a systematic approach to building AI agents that actually work in production.

While everyone’s vibe coding in ChatGPT, Tyler’s teaching thousands of students to build multi-agent systems for real businesses. Hundreds of production deployments. Actual revenue.

Today he’s doing a live build: Taking Apple customer service from idea to working multi-agent system in under 90 minutes.

No theory. Pure execution.

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Key takeaways:

1. Stop Vibe Coding: Most teams write one prompt, test twice, ship to production, and hope for the best. Tyler's rule: "We would never put it into production without a human-in-the-loop checkpoint. That's irresponsible." Start with 100% human review, gradually move to 60-70% autonomy.

2. Use Meta-Prompting to Build Agents: Tyler built Gigawatt—an agent with 72,000 characters of system instructions that builds other agents. It researches the domain, writes V1 instructions, evaluates itself (scores out of 100), identifies gaps, and rewrites to V2. Goes from 77% to 86%+ quality.

3. Build Multi-Agent Architectures: Don't build one agent that does everything. Separate concerns like you'd separate teams. For Apple: Core (expert agent, temp=0, finds facts) + Echo (email agent, temp=0.7, writes responses). Each optimized for its specific role.

4. System Instructions Need 7K-9K Tokens: Structure includes Role (job description), Context (business details), Instructions (step-by-step process), Criteria (guardrails), Examples (meta reasoning). Most people write 200 tokens. Tyler writes 7,000-9,000. That's the foundation.

5. Temperature Is Your Secret Weapon: Tyler's Toy Story analogy: Imagine an icy peak in a claw machine. Temp=0 (frozen): claw picks from top only—deterministic, precise. Temp=1 (melted): claw grabs anywhere—creative, varied. Match temperature to agent's job.

6. Information Hierarchy Prevents Hallucinations: Priority order: RAG database first (scraped company docs), System instructions second (built-in expertise), Web search third (with chain-of-verification). When agents search without verification, they hallucinate.

7. Build Complete Workflows: Tyler's 9-step production workflow with 5+ agents: Email arrives → Sentiment analysis (Cinnamon) → Expert research (Core) → Email writing (Echo) → QA loop → Human checkpoint (Slack) → Generative filter → Send → Log to memory.

8. Observational Evals Come First: Test 20+ different scenarios manually. Include edge cases and adversarial inputs. Document every failure. Save golden examples. Only after building confidence do you add systematic evals in production.

9. Calculate ROI as Labor Cost Reduction: Traditional cost: $460/day (expert time + customer service rep + manager review) = $138K/year. AI cost: $153/day (platform fees + API credits + human review) = $45.9K/year. Savings: $92K annual (67% reduction).

10. Emotion Prompting Actually Works: Tyler ends every prompt with "Go get 'em slugger." Based on research: positive reinforcement improves LLM outputs by ~15%. The same psychology that works on humans works on LLMs. "Be nice to your AI. They're gonna have robot bodies soon."

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Related Content

Podcasts:

* Warp CEO on Profitable AI Agents

* Elizabeth Laraki on AI Product Design

* Claude Code Tutorial

Newsletters:

* AI Agents: The Ultimate Guide for PMs

* How to Build AI Products Right

* Ultimate Guide to AI Prototyping Tools

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