# Write the brief like you're going on holiday

Dean Fankhauser, Founder · Published 8 Sept 2026 · Your workflow

_The note you would leave a colleague covering your accounts for two weeks is the best agent brief you will ever write. What belongs in it, and what belongs in Policy instead._

## The short answer

- If a capable human could not run your accounts from your brief, an agent cannot either.
- Voice, the never-list, and what to do when unsure are the three things worth writing down.
- Times, caps and quiet hours are rules, not guidance, and they belong in Policy where they are enforced.
- Every rejection you write a reason for is a line the brief was missing.

There is a note you write before two weeks off. Not the handover doc with the logins in it. The other one, the short one, where you tell whoever is covering how to sound like you and what to stay away from while you are unreachable.

That note is the best agent brief you will ever write. Most people sit down to write a brief and reach for something else, something that sounds like configuration, and it comes out worse than the note they could have written in ten minutes.

## The holiday test

Here is the test, and it is not really a metaphor. Print your brief. Hand it to a capable person who has never run your accounts. Leave for two weeks. Could they post on your behalf without embarrassing you?

If the answer is no, an agent cannot either. Not because the agent is worse than the person, but because what is missing is missing for both of them. Judgement is not the gap. Context is.

The person covering would ask you questions on day one. What do we sound like. Is there anything we never talk about. Who do I check with when I am not sure. Your brief has to answer those before they get asked, because the agent will not ask. It reads what you wrote and produces a plan. A thin brief produces a generic plan, and generic is the failure you will actually experience. Not disaster. Just posts that could have come from anyone.

## What goes in

Start with how you sound. Three sentences, not a mood board, and an example after each one that is short enough to read twice.

- We sound like one person talking, not a company announcing. Like this: "We rewrote the importer this week because two customers hit the same wall." Not like this: "Excited to share our latest product update."
- We are concrete before we are clever. Like this: "The importer now handles the messy exports, including the ones with a broken date column." Not like this: "Big improvements to data handling."
- We do not oversell. Like this: "This helps if you import a lot of small files. It will not help if your data is already clean." Not like this: "The only importer you will ever need."

Then the never-list. It is a list, not a principle, and it should be blunt enough to check a draft against in two seconds. Never a customer name without permission. Never a screenshot with an email address in it. Never claim a security property. These are the posts that would make you sit up in a cafe abroad and start typing.

Then what to do when unsure, which is the line almost everyone forgets. The agent will hit an ambiguous case in week one. Tell it what you want then: leave the post out, or ask you, or take the safest reading. Any of those is fine. Saying nothing is not, because something gets picked for you and you find out afterwards.

## What does not go in

Posting times. Daily caps. Quiet hours. None of these belong in the brief, and putting them there anyway is the most common way a brief goes wrong.

Those are rules. Rules live in Policy, where the API enforces them. At bounded autonomy, the account's saved policy sets the maximum posts per local day, the allowed visibility values, and the quiet hours in that account's timezone, and work is checked against it before anything flows. At plan review, the approved plan does the same job with its accounts, its window, and its post maximum.

Write "please do not post late at night" into the brief and you have written a wish. A good agent will probably respect it. That word is doing a lot of work. Nothing rejects a post at 2am because your brief was polite about the subject. Set quiet hours in Policy and the 2am post cannot happen at all.

Here is the sorting rule. Anything you would be angry about if it were broken is a rule. Anything you would merely wince at is guidance. Most lines place themselves once you ask which one they are.

## A real brief

_A ten-line brief for a founder account_

```
Voice: one founder talking to another. Plain, first person, no announcements.
Right register: "Spent the morning on a bug that only shows up on Windows. Here is what it turned out to be."
We write about: what we built this week, what broke, what customers keep asking for.
We never write about: hiring, fundraising, other companies by name, politics, anything a customer told us in private.
No emoji. No hashtags except #buildinpublic, and only on posts about the product itself.
Never post a screenshot without checking it for customer names and email addresses.
Threads: one idea per post, short enough to read in one breath, no multi-post thread unless I asked for one.
LinkedIn: same voice, a little longer, still first person. Do not switch into the LinkedIn register.
If you are unsure whether something is public, it is not. Leave it out and say so in the plan.
If a post needs a claim about pricing, security, or a named customer, ask me before writing it.
```

Ten lines, and a person could work from it on Monday morning. Notice what is not in there: no posting times, no cap, no quiet hours, because those get set once in Policy and never argued with again. Notice also that it is written to someone. Nothing in it is addressed to a machine, and it reads better for that.

## The three things people leave out

**The never-list.** Almost every first draft is all voice and no boundaries, because voice is the fun part to write. The never-list is the part that saves you, and it is short. Four or five lines covering the posts you would delete within a minute of seeing them.

**A definition of unsure.** Telling an agent to ask when it is unsure means very little on its own, because uncertainty is not a state it can measure against your standards. Give it a test instead. Unsure means the post makes a claim you have not already published somewhere. Unsure means it names a person outside the company. Write the trigger, not the feeling.

**Who to ask.** If the answer to a question is "ask a human", say which human, and say what happens to the post while it waits. A question with no addressee gets resolved by guessing.

## How the brief changes

You do not write this once. You write it once, then finish it over a month, one rejection at a time.

When you reject a post, write the reason. Not "no", but "we do not describe customers that way" or "this reads like a press release". That sentence is already a brief line, written in the conditions that produce the good ones, which is mild annoyance at a specific example. Move it across. Reject something once without adding the line and you will reject it again, and the second time is on you.

Versioning helps here. Every save of the brief is a new version, and when the agent submits a plan it can attach the version it was working from, so the plan records which brief it was written against. That turns "why on earth did it write that" from an argument into a lookup.

## Keep it short on purpose

A long brief fails twice over.

Humans skim it. Whoever is meant to keep it current stops reading it properly, so it stops being current, and a stale brief is worse than a short one because you still trust it.

Agents do the opposite of skimming, which is the real problem. Everything you wrote gets weight. Your one serious rule about customer privacy sits as one line among eighty, competing with your preference for the word "shipped". The lines that matter get diluted by the lines you wrote because the box was there.

Aim for one screen. Ten to twenty lines. If you cannot say how you sound in that space, you do not know yet, and another page will not help you find out.

The holiday note works precisely because you were in a hurry when you wrote it. You put down what actually mattered, in the order it mattered, and left out everything a sensible person could work out alone. Write the brief in that mood and you will be finished before your coffee goes cold.

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## FAQ

**Does Postdom enforce what I write in the brief?**

No, and it does not claim to. The brief is advisory guidance the agent reads before it plans or writes. Enforcement lives in Policy: caps, quiet hours, visibility, authority level, pause. If a line has to hold even when the agent is having an off day, it belongs in Policy instead.

**What if my accounts have different voices?**

The brief is one document for the workspace, so put the shared voice and the never-list at the top and keep per-platform notes underneath. Most of the variation between accounts turns out to be register and length rather than voice, and a sentence each covers it.

**How do I know the agent actually read it?**

The agent is told to read the brief before planning or writing, and a submitted plan records the version it was written against. Past that, you check the output. A brief that is being followed shows up in the drafts, and one that is being ignored shows up faster.

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Canonical: https://postdom.com/blog/write-the-brief-like-youre-going-on-holiday