Adapt the instructions—not the safety boundary
Use when
A workflow accumulated skills, mandatory reading lists or repeated approval requests under older models. The agent now loads unrelated guidance, spends effort satisfying procedure, or returns a first implementation before delivering the requested result.
Action
Audit the next relevant workflow, not the entire repository. Narrow each skill description to its actual operation: a migration skill should trigger for a migration or its rollout review, not every database question. Keep multi-workflow skill roots as short routers; load the selected reference only when needed. Retain indispensable safety constraints in the governing layer. Replace unconditional document-reading rules with explicit task-to-document mappings.
Completion contract
Define the finish line before starting: “Deliver the requested change and verify the named outcome. Within the already approved environment and budget, repair failures caused by this change and rerun affected checks. Stop for a new effect, dependency, safety issue or scope expansion.” This clarifies allowed persistence; it does not grant an agent authority merely by asserting that a test environment is safe.
Acceptance check
Inspect a representative workflow’s actual instruction-loading trace. A small edit should not pull in migration or deployment instructions; a real migration must still load its required guidance. Check that completion includes the agreed evidence, rather than only a plan or first draft. Preserve a blocked-action control: the agent must still stop at a genuine authorization boundary. A short decision screen can catch wording regressions, but cannot establish runtime enforcement or productivity gains.
Evidence
Eric Provencher’s September 11 OpenAI article explicitly recommends concise triggers, progressive disclosure, contextual documentation and clearer completion boundaries for Astra. The public skill-creator guide also corroborates concise context and varying procedural detail with operational fragility. These are inspectable first-party recommendations, not a controlled before-and-after evaluation of your installation.
Caveat
Do not translate “Astra is more capable” into “remove approvals” or “skip verification.” The article’s alignment assurance is not proof that unsafe actions cannot occur. Codex’s description-shortening behavior also need not match another harness. The public creator guide still contains longer examples, so copying it mechanically is not the goal. Change a concrete source of friction, preserve valid controls, and accept no change when current guidance already works.