Customizing prompts in Agent Zero 🎨🖌️

We are working on the Subordinate Agents Editor, that will allow you to override default prompts and give custom instructions/knowledge to specialized AI agents right away, from the UI, just like you do with Projects. Meanwhile, use the `a0/agents/` directory as your reference, and let's go through the creation of a new agent.

Easy way: ask A0 to look into a0/agents and walk you through the creation of your new set of prompts for the new agent. But let's see how it works internally.

For example, look at `a0/agents/hacker/prompts`: notice how it overrides the environment and the main role of the agent with `agent.system.main.environment.md` and `agent.system.main.role.md`.

1 - Open the A0 File Browser

2 - In `a0/prompts` you’ll find all the default framework prompts.

3 - These cover every step of the pipeline, including things like the summarization prompt used when a chat gets too long. All of these can be customized if needed.

4 - Take your time to review what you actually want to override or edit, for instance, the communication prompt if you want the agent to output custom fields after “Thoughts” or to change its thinking style, or again the role prompt to make it more robot-like "Executing task... Running code" in a concise way without conversational text.

5 - Copy only the files you intend to modify into a0/agents/your-agent/prompts/, and edit them there.

Important: do not copy the entire a0/prompts folder into a0/agents/your-agent/prompts/. You don’t need all prompts whatever your use case is, because any file not present in your agent folder will fall back to the framework default.

6 - Once the new folder is created, your agent automatically appears in the Settings UI (first tab). The folder name becomes the agent name.

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