The brief is the work

When you give an agent a job, you owe it more than a sentence that sounds like work.

You owe it a destination, constraints, and a definition of done. Skip any of those and you will still get output. It will look finished. It will be wrong in a way that takes longer to undo than it took to produce.

A destination is a place the work can arrive. “Make this clearer” is not a place. “A reader should know, in one sentence, who this is for” is a place. The agent can miss a place. It cannot miss a mood. It will keep generating until the page feels dense enough to count as effort.

Constraints are the walls. What must not change. What must not be invented. Who the reader is, and what they should never have to learn in order to use the result. If you do not name the walls, the agent fills the open space. You say “fix the docs.” It rewrites the README, invents a stack, and adds a history of how the project used to work. You meant: add the one command a contributor needs to run before they open a pull request. All of the extra writing is confident. None of it is the job.

Done is a check you can perform without taste. Not “looks professional.” Not “feels complete.” A yes or a no: the heading names the actual subject. The extra section is gone. The claim on the page is the claim you meant. If you cannot point at the work and say whether it arrived, the agent cannot either. It will stop when it is tired of generating.

This is the failure that keeps showing up. The job was vague. The output was fluent. You spent the afternoon reversing a first draft that had already decided what you meant.

The human’s job is the brief. Not the last polish pass. Not catching tone after the fact. The brief is the work: where this is going, what it must not do, and how you will know it got there.

A vague job is a broken job. Write the destination down before you send anyone, or anything, to find it.