How does coaching an AI agent work?
Coaching an AI agent works like coaching a new employee — except the agent never forgets. You write a plain-English instruction, it becomes a memory block, and it shapes every relevant future cycle automatically.
Coaching an AI agent means writing plain-English instructions that become permanent memory. Unlike prompting a chatbot — where your instruction is only active for that session — coaching an agent creates a persistent memory block that reloads on every future heartbeat cycle. You write it once. The agent applies it indefinitely.
What does a coaching note look like?
A coaching note is a plain-English instruction written in the same way you’d brief a human team member:
“Lead with the compliance angle on healthcare CTOs, not ROI.”
“Skip companies with fewer than 10 employees.”
“Subject lines under 6 words get better open rates — keep them short.”
No special syntax. No configuration panel. Just the instruction in natural language.
What happens to the coaching note?
The coaching note is stored as a typed memory block on the agent’s Personal Brain. It’s categorised as a “coaching” type block, assigned a high importance score, and linked to the agent it was written for.
On the next heartbeat, during Brain Assembly, the agent’s context window is built from its top-ranked memory blocks. High-importance coaching notes score near the top and are almost always included. The agent reads the coaching note as part of its context before deciding what to do — the same way a person would remember their manager’s feedback from a previous conversation.
How long does the coaching last?
Permanently, unless explicitly removed or superseded. Unlike a human who might forget feedback after a few weeks, the memory block doesn’t degrade over time. It stays in the Personal Brain and continues to surface on relevant future cycles.
A single coaching note written today will surface on cycles 30, 60, and 90 days from now — still shaping the agent’s output without anyone repeating it.
Who can write coaching notes?
Two sources:
You (the human): At any time, from the coaching interface. You write the instruction, it becomes a memory block immediately.
Supervisor agents: In a multi-agent system, director agents (Sales Director, Marketing Director) review worker outputs and write coaching notes automatically. The Sales Director might observe that the SDR’s outreach is too long and write a coaching note: “Keep first emails under 4 sentences.” That coaching is stored and applied on the SDR’s next cycle without you being involved.
Can coaching be promoted to the whole team?
Yes. If a coaching insight applies to the whole team — not just one agent — it can be promoted to the Team Brain. From there, every agent on the team sees it on their next cycle. A pattern observed in the SDR’s outbound (“healthcare buyers respond to compliance framing”) can be promoted to inform the Marketing Manager’s content and the Ad Manager’s targeting.
This is how a single insight becomes team-wide alignment without a meeting.