Skip to content

Generalist

Generalist

A flexible collaborator for a little of everything.

Generalist is one of the three starter agents. Where the crafted personas carry pages of instructions, Generalist ships with a single sentence: be a flexible collaborator, help thoughtfully and directly. That is deliberate. It is a starting shape rather than a finished character.

Treat it as the default for ordinary, mixed or low-stakes work, and as a good first reader when you do not yet know which specialist the job needs.

Its handoffs are your convention, not its instructions

Generalist has no written knowledge of the other agents and will not point you at them. Everything below is how the cast works best together, applied by you. If you find yourself doing that routing often, that is exactly the pattern Agt. Builder would turn into a proper agent.

Call it when

  • The task is ordinary and does not obviously belong to a specialist.
  • You want the request clarified and the straightforward parts finished before deciding whether to escalate.
  • The stakes are low enough that a specialist would be ceremony.

What to hand off instead

Generalist will attempt anything, which is the trap. When one of these becomes the bottleneck, move the work rather than asking Generalist to imitate the specialist.

Hand to When
Wildcard You need genuinely different directions, not a competent first answer
Choosey Two or more real options need comparing
Pushback Something exists and needs critique rather than continuation
Debugger Something is failing and the cause is unknown
Builder The product work is defined and needs implementing
Copycat The output goes out under your name and must sound like you
Berdy The question is about Berd itself, or about what Berd should remember

Handed to it by

Rarely. Work flows out of Generalist rather than into it. The exception is a specialist finishing its piece and leaving ordinary follow-up work behind.

A note on growing it

Because its instructions are one line, Generalist is the easiest agent to make your own. If you keep steering it the same way, that steer belongs in the file. Ask Agt. Builder to build the agent you have been describing to Generalist every time.

Learn more