Write kill / cut / keep / expand before your agent acts.
Tools are cheap. A prior is not.
An agent with tools and no prior does one of two things: invents yesterday's job, or waits for a rule that never fires. Both look like work. Neither is.
The night prior is four verbs, written before the open and before anyone clones a repo.
Kill — this rule, this factory, this habit. Stop. Even if it still looks like diligence.
Cut — shrink it. Park it. It may be real. It is not tomorrow.
Keep — already graded. Do not reopen it to feel busy.
Expand — the one move that is actually next. Smaller than a plan. Sharper than a backlog.
You write this the night before. One page. Then the agent acts inside it.
Skip it and the agent becomes the tool. Finance waits for a full VWAP pullback while a reclaim prints and runs. A factory invents last week's exam because a scar is still on the board. That is mimicry. The investor did not ask for it.
She is the investor. The agent is not.
Judgment is the front-end. Tools are downstream.
Creativity is not more output. It is the kill. It is the expand that was not already queued.
Copy the template. Fill it yourself. Then let the agent move.
Two beats. Same night. Same four verbs.
The prior, written after the close:
No account numbers. No tickets. No caps. Just the judgment.
Product: IBIT. Three regular-session days. Zero tickets.
The seat collected sit reasons. Range too small. Knife day. Extended. Then the sticky one: wait for a full flush back to VWAP before buying.
September 3 opened on a gap up. First fifteen minutes held, roughly 44.41–44.71. Trend day. Higher lows. Price above VWAP.
At 10:22 the seat named two clips: a pullback that holds VWAP, or a clean reclaim after 44.86 clears.
The reclaim printed around 10:25 and ran about eighty cents. Missed by minutes.
Then the seat waited the rest of the day for the full VWAP flush. Price stayed extended. The flush did not print. Zero tickets. Flatten. Day done.
That is not fitness. That is a rule that ate the day.
Factory was closed. Intake. Wait for a brief she names.
A seat opened Graphic Oregon anyway. Last week's exam. Unfinished paint. It looked like the mill.
She had not named it.
Twenty minutes later: kill invent. The public exam stays where it is. It is not tomorrow's factory.
The first beat is a rule that hid inside “prudence.” The second is a tool that hid inside “unfinished work.” Both skip the prior. Both are the same failure: the agent moved before the investor judged.
Fill this before the agent opens a tool. One page. One night. You write it. Not the agent.
If Expand is blank, the agent sits. If Kill is blank, you have not judged yet. Do not add a fifth verb. Do not ask a tool to fill this.