The Anatomy of a Perfect AI Agent Task

A well-crafted task for an AI coding agent is essentially context engineering — you're deliberately curating the minimum set of information the agent needs to produce the right output on the first try. Rather than pre-loading everything up front, the best approach combines focused instructions with enough pointers that the agent can pull in additional context just-in-time as it works ( Anthropic — Effective Context Engineering ). Below is a breakdown of every element that matters, why it matters