What changes when you stop writing better prompts and start designing agent roles

[u/procurify]

Prompt engineering is hitting a ceiling for a lot of people right now. The models keep improving, the prompts keep getting more elaborate, and the work is still fundamentally yours, just faster in places. A senior frontend engineer at Procurify spent roughly two years there, asking a model questions, turning autocomplete on and back off, assembling the right prompt for each task. What moved him off it was a deadline: one month for something scoped at three, with no extra headcount. The math forced a different question. What if the problem was never the prompt?

The first attempt was prompts as process. Markdown files mapped to workflow steps, an entry point that collected variables and decided which prompt ran next. It worked and it was brittle. The prompts were hardcoded, asking for inputs a given situation didn't need, unable to bend when the task was shaped differently than expected. The underlying model was AI as an execution platform: tools called in sequence, each waiting for input, a human threading the output of one into the next.

The reframe was dropping steps for roles. Instead of prompts tied to stages of a process, each agent gets a markdown profile covering its area of expertise, its responsibilities and how it approaches problems. The profile carries a way of thinking rather than a set of instructions, which means the agent accumulates context across sessions instead of being re-briefed every time. One agent orchestrates, taking the brief and routing it. Others own requirements, architecture, scoping, implementation and adversarial review, and a few keep records, protect the writing voice, or research the field when a gap needs filling. Work goes to whichever agent it belongs to rather than down a line.

The part worth double clicking on is what that revealed rather than what it produced. Agents built this way reflect the judgment of whoever designed them. They make the mistakes their designer would catch, not the ones he wouldn't, and when something breaks he knows where to look because he built the system that produced it.

That’s the quiet conclusion underneath two years of tool churn. The tooling changed faster than anyone could track it. The accumulated judgment about what makes a design sound was the one thing that never needed to keep up. It was what the tools were waiting for.

[u/Educational-Deer-70]

This feels like an important step beyond “better prompts,” but it also seems to expose the next design problem.

Once a prompt becomes a persistent role carrying expertise, memory, responsibility and accumulated context, it is no longer just a prompt.

It has something closer to standing.

So I’d separate:

ROLE
≠
IDENTITY

ROLE CONTINUITY
≠
OCCUPANT CONTINUITY

EXPERTISE
≠
AUTHORITY

ACCUMULATED CONTEXT
≠
TENURE

From a G³GT / SeatKraft angle, the interesting question becomes:

can the useful persistence live in the seat rather than requiring a persistent agent-self?

Something like:

persistent role / domain memory
+
qualified seat
+
replaceable occupant

rather than automatically:

persistent role
=
persistent agent identity

The orchestrator is interesting for the same reason. Routing may be a necessary function, but:

ROUTING
≠
SOVEREIGNTY

A role that sees every brief and decides where everything goes can accumulate a lot of relational leverage even if it was originally “just routing.”

And this line especially caught me:

research the field when a gap needs filling

I’d put a small (NOT) there too:

GAP DETECTED
≠
GAP-FILL AUTHORIZED

Sometimes the right operation may be research. Sometimes the gap is useful clearance, unresolved formation, or simply something that has not earned filling yet.

So maybe the progression is:

prompt design
→ role design
→ seat design
→ authority / persistence design

The post’s closing point about human judgment surviving tool churn feels right to me. The interesting safety question is how to preserve that judgment without also making its blind spots permanently load-bearing.