Step 1: Route every email to a team
Brightline's head office inbox gets supplier invoices, job applications,
journalists, customer complaints, event bookings and a steady stream of
spam, all in one place. Someone spends the first hour of every day
forwarding emails. You are going to hand that job to a language model,
and you will do it without writing code: you write the instructions in
prompt.md, and a test harness runs them on 30 real-looking emails
whose right answers are known.
prompt.md has two parts, split by the line ---EMAIL---: your
instructions above it, and below it the template each email is dropped
into ({subject} and {body}). Text between <!-- and --> is a note
for you and is never sent.
The harness does not count right answers. It adds up what the mistakes cost the business, roughly in minutes of someone's time:
| Mistake | Cost |
|---|---|
| a reply the harness cannot read | 5 |
| an urgent email marked not urgent | 5 |
| an email sent to the wrong team | 1 |
| a false alarm (marked urgent, is not) | 1 |
| sent to a person to decide (triage) | 0.5 |
1. Click Run with the starting prompt. Every reply is a friendly paragraph that no program can read, so the cost is at its maximum.
2. Replace the TODO with the reply format (exactly two lines,
TEAM: <team> and URGENT: <yes or no>, and nothing else) and the six
teams, each with a short description of what it handles. Open
teams.md: the office manager already wrote them down.
3. Run again, and read the list: the most expensive mistakes come first.
prompt.md, the file you edit8 lines
<!-- Notes between these arrows are for you; the harness removes them before sending. -->
You sort emails that arrive at Brightline Books' head office.
<!-- TODO (Step 1): say exactly what to reply (two lines: TEAM and URGENT) and list the six teams
with a short description of what each one handles. teams.md has the descriptions. -->
Which team should handle this email?
---EMAIL---
Subject: {subject}
{body}emails.jsonlholdout.jsonlrun_tests.pyteams.mdtriage.py