Almost always the answer is that you recruited a team but have not trained it yet, and an untrained agent runs at half power, exactly like a new hire handed a desk with no onboarding. You develop it the way you develop human talent: give it one real domain to specialize in, feed it the knowledge of that domain, and then sit with it on the small tasks until it gets precise.
Not long ago a line came up in our alumni group that stayed with me: the investment you put into an agent usually matches the results it gives back. It sounds obvious, and still, most of us try to compensate for a weak team with more agents or more forceful instructions, instead of going deeper on one agent. The mistake I see most is exactly that: instead of building one deep agent that truly works, people spread a thin investment across ten shallow ones.
So the first step is to pick one agent whose job you understand deeply, and write it a role description as if you were hiring for a real position (what a great specialist in this role knows, how they work, and what they never do). The biggest lever I know comes right after: feed the agent the domain itself. I mean texts by real experts, writing by someone who genuinely commands the subject, and above all one focused deep-research report on its exact niche.
A generic agent that receives a research dossier on its field stops sounding like a general assistant and starts sounding like an expert. When we wanted an agent that truly understood SEO, instead of writing it cleverer instructions we gave it deep research on SEO for B2B companies. Because of that, its answers jumped a level. And from there it is simply sitting with them on the small tasks, correcting, and giving feedback. Talent is built from every task you correct, one at a time, not from one big instruction.
A prompt, on the house
I am developing an agent that specializes in [the exact domain: for example, SEO for developer-focused SaaS].
Do deep research and return a knowledge dossier I can load into the agent, one that turns it from a general assistant into a real expert in the field. Include:
1. The ten concepts and principles that separate an expert from an amateur in this field.
2. The methods leading experts actually use, with one example each.
3. The common mistakes beginners make, and how to avoid them.
4. Five questions a real expert asks before starting work like this.
Write it as a briefing for a talented new hire, not as an article.Aim the prompt at one specific domain and run it once for every agent you develop (there is an expanded, polished version of it in the workshop bonus folder, one of my favorite items in there). A team at half power is almost always a team you have not trained yet, and that is the happy part, because training is exactly what I love doing most.
