Steer Self-driving agents
Contents
Use steering instructions to tell Self-driving agents what matters to your project and how to approach their work. Set shared project instructions for every agent, then add guidance for research agents, implementation agents, or scouts.
Add instructions for an agent role
- Open Self-driving > Settings in the project you want to configure.
- Find Steering, below Autonomy.
- Choose Research, Implementation, or Scouts.
- Write your instructions in plain text or Markdown, then select Save.
You must be a project admin to save instructions. Each role has its own field, with a limit of 20,000 characters. Saving one role keeps the other roles' instructions unchanged.
| Role | What these agents do | What to put in their instructions |
|---|---|---|
| Research | Investigate signals, find root causes, assess impact and priority, and recommend what to do next. | Evidence to check, how to judge impact, and what makes a finding worth acting on. |
| Implementation | Turn reports into code changes, run checks, open pull requests, and address review feedback. | Code conventions, validation steps, and pull request expectations. |
| Scouts | Explore product data and connected sources, find problems and opportunities, and create signals or reports. | Areas to explore, customers or environments to exclude, and what deserves a report. |
Switching tabs keeps unsaved drafts while the editor stays open. Save each role you change. Discard changes restores that role's saved instructions.
Share instructions across agents
Select the project instructions link in the Steering section to open Settings > Agent instructions > Project instructions. Put guidance that applies across roles there, such as your product's terminology, repository ownership, or coding conventions.
All Self-driving agents receive project instructions, including research, implementation, scouts, and the agents that support them. Other eligible PostHog cloud tasks also use these shared instructions.
A role's steering instructions supplement the project instructions. You don't need a special tag such as <self-driving-research>: selecting the Research tab assigns the instructions to research agents.
Autonomous Self-driving runs don't use your personal My instructions setting.
Instructions for one scout
The Scouts tab applies to every scout in the project. Each scout also keeps its own brief. Edit an individual scout in Self-driving > Scouts when the guidance should apply only to that scout.
Write useful instructions
Describe the behavior you want and the evidence the agent should use. Keep shared rules in project instructions and put guidance for a particular stage in that role's tab.
Research example
Implementation example
Scouts example
Steering guides the agent's decisions. Use Autonomy to control automatic pull request generation and use the agent's access settings to control its tools.
Change or clear instructions
Saved instructions apply when an agent starts or resumes. Saving instructions doesn't interrupt a running agent.
To remove a role's instructions, clear its field and select Save. Agents in that role still receive the shared project instructions. Clearing the Scouts field also preserves each scout's individual brief.
Manage instructions through MCP
An assistant connected to the PostHog MCP server can read and update steering instructions and shared project instructions for your current project.