Think like a manager

Working with one person, you are limited by their brainpower, memory and hours in the day. The agent in your chat is more like a manager who can hand work to as many staff as the job needs. Each helper, called a subagent, takes part of the job and reports back.

So size the job to the team, not to one person. Ask for the version you would give a department: ten options instead of one, every file instead of a sample, three independent reviews instead of a quick look.

A good manager keeps their own head clear. On a big job, ask the main chat to hand the reading and research to helpers and keep only the summaries. The main chat then remembers the whole picture for longer.

Say what you want to end up with and why, then let the agent work out the steps. You would not tell a good employee which keys to press.

Tell it what done looks like: a one-page summary, a spreadsheet with these columns, a draft you can send as is. Without that, it guesses, and guesses vary.

For a long job, ask it to show you the plan first. Fixing a plan takes one message. Fixing finished work takes many.

You do not need to watch it work. Send the job, get on with something else, and come back to the result. Push notifications tell you when it has finished.

Your job moves from doing to reviewing. Read what it made, say what is wrong in plain words, and let it fix it. Fixing it yourself teaches the agent nothing in this chat.