Introducing Optional Instructions for OCI Generative AI Agents 🔎

Buried within the December 2024 release notes for the OCI Generative AI Agents service is this little gem 💎:

This now enables you to do some prompt engineering to influence the response produced by an agent, this is useful if you need to tailor the length, style and tone of the response from the agent. For example you may need the response to include a maximum of 3 bullet points.

To provide additional instructions to an agent response, navigate to the agent and select Edit. Below you will see a field named Instructions for RAG generation, within this add the additional instructions. In the example below, I have simply asked it to crerate a short summary using a maximum of 3 bullet points.

Here is a before/after comparison of the response from the agent, this is using an agent I built that is trained on UK immigration policy data.

Before

After

There’s some other interesting features in the December release, including more detailed citations and the ability to override Object Storage citation links through custom Object Storage metadata.