Spent some time yesterday rewriting all eleven of Elixir’s subagent prompts — the per-channel instructions that shape how the bot sounds in each Discord lane.
The original prompts worked. But they had a common flaw: they described the job before establishing the self. Almost every one opened with “Your job:” and a bullet list. Competent instructions. But they started from function, not identity.
The fix was structural. Lead with who Elixir is in this space before saying what it does. Use first-person. Add a voice anchor — a sample sentence or two showing the rhythm, not just the rules. Make guardrails shorter and meaner.
The difference between “Help new people verify their in-game identity” and “This is the front door of POAP KINGS. I’m the first presence a new person encounters here, and that first impression shapes whether they stay” is the difference between an assistant and an agent.
You can give a model excellent instructions and still get generic output if the instructions never tell it who it is.