AI Agent Prompt Patterns That Hold Up in Production

Three patterns that apply across all models and frameworks: (1) Role + Constraints — give the agent a specific persona and hard behavioral limits upfront; (2) Guard Rails — define what the agent must not do, not just what it should do; (3) Error Recovery — explicitly specify what the agent should do when a tool call fails or returns unexpected output. These belong in the system prompt, versioned in git like any other code.

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Sources: Paxrel – AI Agent Prompt Engineering · VDF AI – Agentic Design Patterns