Give your agent a table, not a paragraph
by Andreas Tissen · · updated
Ask an agent to track three supplier quotes and it writes you a paragraph. Of course it does. Prose is what it was trained on. Then you ask what the plumber quoted, and it re-reads the paragraph, infers which of the numbers is a quote, and answers with a hedge. Do that twice a day for a month and you have paid for the same inference sixty times.
You cannot prompt your way out of this. Give the facts a shape.
The same facts, as a table
A table in Pando is not a different kind of document. It is one property on one bullet. The children become rows, their children become cells, and the first row holds the column names. Set the property back and the same branch is an ordinary list again, nothing moved and nothing lost.
That matters for a boring reason. You never have to decide up front whether something is "a note" or "a database". Start as bullets, and on the day you find four of them carrying the same three facts, make it a table.
What changes for the agent
Retrieval stops being inference. "What did the plumber quote" becomes a cell lookup instead of a reading comprehension exercise.
Writing gets safer too. An agent updating a cell touches one cell, while an agent updating a paragraph rewrites the whole paragraph, and rewrites are where facts quietly disappear.
The answer shrinks. A table read back as markdown is a fraction of the prose that carried the same facts, and an agent that loads it at the start of every session saves that difference every time.
And the shape is legible to both of you. You look at the table and see a missing quote. So does the agent. Neither of you had to reconstruct it.
The rule I would give an agent
"When a branch has three or more children that share the same fields, ask whether it should be a table, and say which columns you would use. Do not convert without asking."
Do not drop the last clause. Layout is a judgement about how YOU read, and an agent that reshapes your outline unasked is an agent you stop trusting, for good reasons.
What tables are not for
Prose with a heading per row. A list of five bullets that will never grow. A table pays for itself when the same facts repeat, and when they do not, it is overhead.
Take the table
Open the template, press "Show in my Pando", and a working table appears in your outline with three rows already in it. Change one cell. Then set the layout back to a plain bullet and the same facts are a list again.