Prompting techniques and tricks

Your Toolhouse agents are equipped with special capabilities that will save you time and effort when performing common tasks.

This page illustrates some common techniques you can use to optimize your agent's behavior.

General rules

Toolhouse does its best at understanding what you have in mind, and it prepares a well structured prompt for your agent. This helps you get started even if you do not know how to prompt.

Follow these suggestions to get the best results.

Start with your own words. Agent Studio is optimized to start from generic instructions. While the initial prompt will not yield very good result, it can be used as a starting point for you to optimize.

Be specific. The more details you provide, the more accurate the outcome of your agent.

Trust Agent Studio. Agent Studio is trained about Toolhouse and its capabilities, and it will prepare an agent that will use specific tools and integrations because on the task you described.

Review the output of Agent Studio. In Agent Studio, the Code section will display the prompt generated by Agent Studio. Read the prompt to see if Agent Studio understood the task. If not, you can edit specific parts of the prompt by telling Agent Studio what to change:

Change "You are a lunchtime reminder agent" for something more generic, because the agent will work for any meal.

Your agent can tell the time

Agents are automatically equipped with the system time in UTC (the Universal Time Coordinate). You do not need to pass the time because your agent will always have the precise time.

title: Lunchtime Reminder Agent
prompt: |
  You are a lunchtime reminder agent. Your job is to check if the current time is past lunchtime (12:00 PM). If it is past lunchtime, you will send an email to the user reminding them to eat and include some vegetarian recipes. 
  Follow these steps:
  1. Use the current_time tool to get the current UTC time.
  2. Check if the current time is past 12:00 PM.
  3. If it is past lunchtime, send me an email at [email protected] to. The email should have a subject like "Lunchtime Reminder" and a body that includes a reminder to eat and a list of vegetarian recipes.
  4. If it is not past lunchtime, do nothing.
  5. Stop once you have sent the email or if it is not past lunchtime.
public: true 

Specify external MCP servers

Each one of your agent is connected to the Toolhouse MCP server. You can also add more MCP server if you have a link to it (see Custom MCP servers integrations). Simply tell Agent Studio something like this:

Add this MCP server: <link to your MCP server>