THE ANATOMY OF A PRODUCTION HARNESS (COMPONENT MAP)

THE INSTRUCTION MANAGER The instruction manager is the component that assembles the agent's standing rules. Standing rules are instructions that apply at every step, such as "be polite," "cite your sources," or "never touch the secrets folder." These instructions usually reach the model as a system prompt, which is a block of instructions placed at the start of the model's reading material and treated as the background rules of the conversation. Why would a separate component be needed just to hold instructions? Because in a real system the rules come from several places. There may be global rules that apply to every agent a company runs. There may be project rules that apply only to one project. There may be rules specific to the task at hand, and rules that depend on who the user is. The instruction manager collects all of these, puts them in a sensible order, resolves any conflicts, and produces one assembled set of instructions. A helpful comparison is a school handbook. There are rules for the whole school, rules for a particular classroom, and rules for a field trip. A student needs one clear list, not four separate documents to cross-check at every moment. When the instruction manager is missing, rules end up scattered through the code as pieces of text, and nobody can tell which rules are in force.