Things to say to your agent

Your agent reads the tool catalog, so you can say things your own way. These phrasings are ones that reliably produce the right sequence.

Finding out where you stand

• "Summarize my positioning and the competitors I've marked as never-mention."
• "List my collections with how many posts each has published, and which have Auto-Pen on."
• "Show the topic map for Field notes: what's covered, what's open, what's been dismissed."
• "What did we publish in the last 30 days, and which posts got Search Console impressions?"

Deciding what to write

• "Give me ten topics for Field notes, ranked by search demand and lowest competitor coverage, grounded in my positioning."
• "Which open spokes in the AI Search cluster are easiest to rank for?"
• "Suggest positioning from my existing content, but don't save it, show me first."
• "Draft a whole starting strategy for acme.com and show me before saving anything." → suggest_onboarding

Writing

• "Write 'X' in Field notes with the full pipeline and publish it." → run_collection
• "Draft 'X' in Field notes but don't publish; I want to read it first." → ingest_article + run_kernel with article_id
• "Research 'X' with these URLs, let me pick the angle, then write it." → run_arena with a direction gate
• "Write this outline in Hazel, Aspen and Cedar into three drafts so I can compare."
• "Queue these three spokes for the next Planner slots." → set_topic
• "Turn on the Planner for Field notes at three posts a week, manual approval." → configure_collection

Improving

• "Re-run internal links and metadata on this post and show me what each pass added." → run_enhance_pass
• "Rewrite this post in Birch. Keep every fact."
• "Generate three cover options for this post with different image models and let me pick."

Sites

• "Preview a phantom site for acme.com. Don't create anything yet." → plan_phantom dry run
• "Go ahead with that plan, but call it 'The Ledger Room' and post four times a week." → plan_phantom with accept and overrides
• "Is the phantom live yet? What's its URL?"
• "Rebuild the site so the two new posts show."
• "Price acme-review.com and connect it if it's under $30."

Waiting

• "Check on it every ten minutes and tell me when it's done."
• "What's the status of job 6f2a9c4e?"
• "Cancel the research on that post."

Habits that help

• Name the collection. Most tools need one; saying it saves a round-trip.
• Say whether to publish. The one-shot pipeline publishes; the draft tools don't. Your agent will pick the right one if you say which you want.
• Ask for the plan before the action when it's expensive: "tell me what you'd do first." Onboarding and configuration tools have built-in dry runs for exactly this.
• Quote a KB number when you want the agent to follow a documented path: "do it the way KB-503 describes."