Most agent prompts are instructions. Do this. Then do that. If X, do Y. The problem: Instructions break the moment reality diverges from what you anticipated when you wrote them. And in production, reality diverges constantly. The shift that changed how we build agents at rp1 : stop writing instructions, start encoding reasoning frameworks. Don't tell the agent what to do in situation A — teach it how to think about situations like A, so it can handle A, B, and the edge case you didn't name. This is the core idea behind constitutional prompting . Instead of a procedure, you give the agent: A typed contract for its outputs Explicit principles for how to reason under uncertainty Anti-patterns it must recognise and avoid A clear definition of when to pause vs. proceed The result isn't just more reliable agents. It's agents you can hand off to another engineer — or another agent — without a lengthy briefing. 👉 Prem Pillai wrote the full breakdown of how we apply this in rp1's workflow layer.…