Apply global rules to all sub-agents of a supervisor at once
T
Tamara Oechsler
Today, in the CLAudia Agência multi-agent setup, each sub-agent loads its own instruction block (system prompt) completely independently. The supervisor has his own rules, but they are not propagated to the sub-agents — when the supervisor calls an expert, he sends only the client's question, and the specialist answers based solely on the client's prompt.
Recurrent scenario in onboarding and post-launch adjustments:
- Customer wants to add a global behavior rule (“never answer X”, “if you don't know the answer, transfer it to a human with full context”, “always return in tone Y”) that must apply to ALL sub-agents.
- Today the only option is to edit agent by agent, manually copying the same instruction to each one. In supervisors with 5, 10, 20+ specialists, this is time-consuming, error-prone, and creates divergence between agents (someone forgets to update one).
- Adding the rule to the supervisor's description doesn't work, because that description is only for routing - it doesn't reach the sub-agents.
Request: allow defining, at the supervisor level (or in an equivalent field above the sub-agents), a set of global instructions that are automatically injected/inherited by the system prompt of each linked sub-agent. Possible formats:
- “Global Rules” field in the supervisor, whose content is prepended/appended to the system prompt of each sub-agent at run time.
- Reusable prompt templates (a section can be referenced by multiple agents).
- “Apply to all” tool in the agent editor, which updates the settings of the selected sub-agents in batches.
Motivation: reduce maintenance friction, ensure consistency of behavior among all specialists, and accelerate the iteration cycle when rules need to be revised after observing behavior in production.