#Agent prompts

Every surface that names a piece of work can hand it to a coding agent. An Agent Prompts menu appears on epics, quests and feedback, and a click copies a ready prompt for Claude Code, Codex or anything else that reads a paste.

It starts off. The switch is Settings ▸ Work ▸ Agent prompts, one click, once, per project. Until you turn it on the menus are not there, and that is deliberate: a project that does not hand work to agents should not carry a menu that does.

Nothing is ever sent anywhere. The prompt is rendered in your browser and put on your clipboard, and Lore neither transmits it nor keeps a copy of what you pasted.

#The four prompts

Review asks an agent to sharpen a plan before anyone works it: take the decisions the spec left open, tighten the vague quests, and say plainly what it cannot answer alone.

Activate hands the whole epic over, quest by quest: begin it if it needs beginning, then accept, work, verify, commit and complete each quest in turn. It is not the same thing as Begin, which is the epic's own lifecycle action and stays where it is. Copying Activate changes nothing about the epic.

Work on it on a quest is the narrow version: one quest, one branch, one commit, and anything discovered beyond it is a comment rather than extra scope.

Work on it on a feedback item starts before there is a quest: it accepts the report, creates the quest linked to it, does the work, and ends by telling the reporter what shipped.

#Writing your own

Each prompt has a built-in default, and Settings ▸ Work is where you replace it. Reset to default deletes your version rather than copying today's text into the box, so a prompt you have reset keeps following the built-in one as it improves.

The templates are written in English on purpose. Their words are the names of the tools an agent calls, so translating them would break them. The labels and toasts around them are localized; the payload is not.

#The seven placeholders

{{project}} and {{slug}} are not interchangeable, and this is the one thing worth getting right. An MCP call's project_name matches the project's title, never its slug. A project titled Kanban v2 has the slug kanban-v2, and a prompt that hands the slug to project_name answers "not found". Use {{project}} wherever you name the project to a tool, and {{slug}} only where you are building a URL by hand.

A placeholder Lore does not know is left in the text exactly as you wrote it, so a typo shows up in what you paste rather than blanking a line. And a placeholder that happens to appear inside a value is never expanded: a quest titled Fix {{url}} handling keeps its own title.

#A worked example

Every project's verify commands and branch rules are different, and that is the edit worth making. An Activate template for a project that verifies with one command and does not let an agent merge:

Work epic {{reference}} "{{title}}" of the Lore project "{{project}}" to
completion, quest by quest.

The epic: {{url}}

Read it with `epic_get` (project_name "{{project}}", number {{number}}) and
its quests with `quest_list` (`epic: {{id}}`, `detail: "full"`).

Work in a git worktree, on a branch named after the epic. Never on main.

For each quest: `quest_accept`, do the work, tick each objective with
`quest_objective_set`, then run `make verify` and fix everything red before
moving on. One commit per quest. `quest_complete` with a short note.

When every quest is done, run `make verify` once more on the whole branch,
push the branch, and open a pull request. Do NOT merge to main: this project
merges by review. Then file an outcome folio under the epic with
`folio_create` and `epic_number` {{number}}.

That is the shape most edits take: the same skeleton, with the project's own commands in it and its own rule about who is allowed to merge.

#Who can change them

Reading the templates is open to any project member; changing one is the project owner's. The prompts are stored per project, not per member: one project, one set.