The 15-Minute Agent Setup Checklist

The exact setup I run before an agent touches real work. Twelve steps, four stages — each one is a checkbox you can actually tick.

How to use this: work top to bottom. Stage 1 keeps the agent honest, Stage 2 makes it obey, Stage 3 makes it reusable, Stage 4 keeps it safe. Skip a stage and you'll meet the failure it prevents — usually at the worst time.

Stage 1 — Honesty (minutes 0–3)

Give the agent an exit. Add one line to any task: "If the answer isn't in the provided material, say so instead of guessing." Hallucination drops immediately.

Demand sources for every claim. "Cite the source for each point. No source, no claim." Wrong-but-confident becomes findable instead of invisible.

Ask for confidence, not just answers. "Rate your certainty 1–5 for each conclusion." The 2s and 3s are where you double-check.

Stage 2 — Obedience (minutes 3–6)

Front-load every constraint. Deadline, format, and length go in the first two sentences — not the end. Models weight openings heavily.

Define the failure behavior. "If you can't meet the format, stop and say which constraint broke." No more silently-wrong output.

Stage 3 — Leverage (minutes 6–10)

Turn your best prompt into a template. Swap the specifics for placeholders — {{URL}}, {{AUDIENCE}}, {{N}} — and save it where you write.

Pick your daily three. Briefing, research, drafting: the three prompts you'll actually reuse. Make them one click away.

Write a 5-line agent profile. Who it's serving, tone, hard rules, what never to do. Paste it at the top of every session.

Stage 4 — Rails (minutes 10–15)

Decide what the agent may never do alone. Sending email? Spending money? Deleting anything? Write the list down, tell the agent.

Make it ask before acting outside its lane. "Before any action beyond reading and drafting, list what you'd do and wait for my OK."

Keep a log of failures. One line per miss: what was asked, what went wrong. Ten entries in, you'll see your setup's real weakness.

That's the setup. The books are the operating system.

The checklist keeps an agent honest for a day. 58 Prompts for Power Users runs your whole week — research, writing, code, automation — with when-to-use notes and failure modes for every prompt.

Get 58 Prompts — $29 or the Complete Collection — $35

New agent instead? Start with the Complete Beginner's Guide — $12.