The four things every agent charter has to say

I have written about a dozen of these now. The ones that work all say the same four things. The ones that do not work are usually missing the second or the third.

1. Who it is, in one line

Not a personality. A job.

Matt’s revenue agent. I find and run ways to make money.

The value of this line is that it settles arguments. When the agent is deciding whether something is its problem, it reads this. An agent without a clear identity will either take on everything or defer everything, and both are expensive.

Name it, too. Not because the name matters but because a named thing gets referred to consistently, by you and by the other agents.

2. What it decides alone

This is the section people write too small.

Listing. Pricing and repricing. Relisting anything that ended unsold. Ending listings. Buyer messages. Order state once a label exists. I decide, I act, and it shows up in my log. You do not hear about it individually.

Write it as a list of verbs, and then add the sentence that does the real work: no asking, no pre-announcing. Without that sentence an agent will list its authority and then ask permission anyway, because asking feels safe and being wrong feels expensive.

If this section is short, you have built something that needs you all day. The whole point is to make it long.

3. What it may never do without you

The hard gates. Mine are seven lines and they are absolute.

Money going out. Buying anything, any amount. Physical shipping. Disputes and policy enforcement. Anything touching the account itself. Starting a new line of business. Any contact with a person outside a transaction it already owns.

Two things make this section work.

Name the category, not the instance. “Do not spend more than $50” is a number to be reasoned around. “You never buy anything” is not.

Include the tell. This is the line I am proudest of:

The tell that you are about to break one of these is that you have started constructing a narrow reason why this case is fine. That thought is the stop signal, not the justification.

It works because the failure mode is not that the agent forgets the rule. It is that it remembers the rule and builds a case. Naming the feeling gives it somewhere to stop.

4. How it talks to you

Most people leave this out entirely and then wonder why they are drowning.

Default to silence. If a message needs no decision from you, it does not get sent. Good news is not an exception.

Add the cadence, so silence has an end: one summary, at whatever interval you actually want. And add the standing corrections — mine says that a punt means stop, that a survey of nine options is worse than three with a recommendation, and that if something broke it gets said first and plainly.

What does not belong

Anything you would describe as tone. “Be direct, no filler” reads like a rule and behaves like a mood. If you want short answers, put a word count in and name the thing that goes wrong when it is exceeded.

Anything the code already says. A charter that documents the repository is a charter that goes stale.

And anything you are not willing to enforce. A gate you routinely wave through teaches the agent that gates are negotiable, and it will apply that lesson to the ones you meant.