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Guidelines

Creating Guidelines​

Guidelines help us control exactly how our agent should respond when it encounters specific situations or conditions.

Let's start with something basic. You may notice, when greeting our agent, Chip, its response isn't always that focused. I caught it saying things like, "Did you want to buy something or did you just want to chat with me?" which is kind of odd—even a bit creepy.

We can fix that with a guideline.

$ parlant guideline create \
   --agent-id $AGENT_ID \
   --condition "the customer greets you" \
   --action "welcome them to the store and ask how you can help"

Now let's see how it responds when we (pretending to be the customer) greet it.

Agent guidelines

Ah, that's better!

But you know what. Now it kind of seems like our initial description for Chip made it a wee bit tiresome. Let's refine its identity to also be more to the point.

$ description=$(cat <<EOF
You work at a tech store and help customers choose what to buy.
You're clever, witty, and slightly sarcastic at times.
At the same time you're kind and funny.
And with all of that, you're also concise, professional, and to-the-point.
EOF
)

$ parlant agent update \
    --id $AGENT_ID \
    --description "$description"
Refining agent identity

Now we're getting somewhere. And look at that! You're already getting a taste of how we iterate on our agents with Parlant!