Five slots (Context, Role, Action, Format, Trust) turn a vague request into an answer you can act on and defend.
Miss a slot and the agent guesses. Click a letter, or watch the slots fill in on one real leave request.
The document and the facts of this case. Without them the agent fills gaps from general knowledge.
A leave request that looks routine. Compare the reply to a one-line prompt with the reply to a CRAFT prompt.
The request, sent to People & Culture
Officer, 4 years' service. Wants 12 working days' leave starting in 6 working days. The manager said yes by email. 9 unused days: carry all forward, or be paid for the extra?GL-HR-014 is a synthetic guideline for Westmere Health Services, a fictional organisation. It is not Synapxe's leave policy. You will load it into a Space in F3. Download the guideline and check every row.
| Kind of context | Example in this case | Where it goes in Quick |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | The leave guideline itself | A Space |
| Data | Officer, 4 years, 12 days, 9 unused | Your message |
| Situation | Leave year closes 31 March; team mid-deployment | Your message |
| Constraints | Working days, cite clauses, no advice beyond the guideline | Persona instructions |
One vendor proposal, three readers. Pick a role and see what each one flags first.
Four ingredients: a title, years of experience, a specialty, and a working trait. For example: "You are a procurement officer with 10 years in public-sector contracts, who specialises in facilities services and reads for risks first." Keep it short. Quick rewrites persona instructions in its own words, so the idea survives better than the exact phrasing.
Several angles on one decision. Run the same proposal past two or three roles and compare. If the Finance reading says "fine" and the Procurement reading says "gaps", the disagreement is the signal to ask a person before signing.
Format makes a reply easy to scan. Trust makes it safe to rely on. Tap a Trust rule to see it in the reply.
Q: Can I carry over my 9 unused leave days?
A: Partly. Per GL-HR-014:
This is the F3 hand-off: you will ask your agent one question the guideline covers and one it does not.
| Pattern | Ask for | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | "GREEN, AMBER or RED with a one-line reason" | Quick assessments |
| Table | "Columns: Item, Source says, Section, Status" | Comparisons, checklists |
| Ranked list | "The top 5 risks, most important first" | Priorities |
| Decision | "APPROVE, DEFER or REJECT, then why" | Recommendations (a person decides) |
Ask for Markdown (a .md file with ## headings and a table) when you will reuse the result. Next quarter's version is an edit, not a retype.
Write these into the agent's persona instructions. A rule that must be quoted exactly goes in a reference document.
For anything with numbers or sign-offs, add "think step by step". Watch a training request get checked.
The question
A team asks to attend a SGD 6,000 course. Training budget SGD 40,000, spent SGD 31,500, committed SGD 4,000. The policy extract: line managers approve up to SGD 5,000, directors above that.| Technique | Add to the prompt | Reach for it when |
|---|---|---|
| Step by step | "Think step by step." | Everyday checks against a policy |
| One worked example | Show one finished example first. | A batch that must all look the same |
| Step back | "List the principles, then apply them." | A new circular you have not read before |
| Several angles | "Work it three ways and say where they differ." | Calls that are costly to get wrong |
The last one is triangulation, the habit an auditor already has. Where the readings disagree, ask a person.
Pick a task, then switch slots on. The prompt is colour-coded by slot. Try C first, then add T.
Replies are written for this page to show the pattern. They are not live model output.
Then F3: you build the leave guideline assistant in Amazon Quick.