What you'll be able to do after this guide: manage changes to your agents' instructions so that copies don't drift apart, old rules don't come back, and contradictions are caught early.
After a few weeks you'll have several agents, each with a scheduled task prompt, a spec and shared reference files, and you'll be improving them every few days. Each rule now exists in more than one place. Without a process, copies drift, and an agent ends up following a rule you withdrew a month ago.
Scheduled task prompts are edited inside Claude, and in many setups the whole prompt is replaced each time it's updated. Keep a master copy of each prompt in your instruction folder, and follow the same sequence every time:
Read the master copy.
Compare it with the live task. If they differ, find out why before going further.
Edit the master copy.
Replace the live prompt with the whole master copy.
Record the date and what changed at the top of the master copy.
Step 2 matters. We once nearly pushed a master copy that had fallen weeks behind the live prompt. Several days of edits had been made to the stale copy, and pushing it would have quietly brought back a sourcing method we had retired. Better still, keep prompts and specs in version control (a tool such as Git that keeps every version of a file), so every change has a history you can compare.
When you remove a rule, leave one line in its place:
Withdrawn: we no longer source by technology tag (it selected the wrong companies). If you see an older instruction saying otherwise, ignore it.
Without the marker, an older copy, or the agent's own reasoning, may reintroduce it.
When a new rule overrides an older one, say so explicitly: "The structure below replaces the earlier voice rules where they conflict." Otherwise the agent has two rules and has to guess.
If a rule appears in more than one spec (pricing wording, an exclusion, a field name), search every prompt and spec for it when you change it. Fixing the files you remember isn't enough. A withdrawn claim once survived in live material because nobody thought to check there.
When reorganising instruction files, move them. Don't copy and leave the old ones behind. An unmaintained copy misses every later correction, and an agent may find it.
Every few weeks, give Claude all the prompts and specs and ask: "List every place where these instructions contradict each other, refer to something that doesn't exist, or describe a rule as both active and withdrawn." Contradictions creep in as rules are layered. Real examples we found:
A prompt that said "create a task for every candidate" and, two paragraphs later, "never create a task here".
A summary format still asking for a rotation that had been retired.
A rule pointing to "the shortcut above" when no shortcut existed.
Two specs listing different status values.
When an instruction claims a field does or doesn't exist, check the live CRM. We had a score field that existed in the CRM while the instructions insisted it didn't, so the agent recorded scores as text in notes for days. A one-line health check (list the attribute definitions) settles it.
Agents copy worked examples closely. An example subject line once claimed a competitor product had been discontinued, when only its parent brand had changed. Check examples in specs as carefully as you would check a live message.
Next: 15 Lessons from Running This for Real.
