The templates
These are the working templates Bears and Mosquitoes points to, and the one a leader fills in before anyone is engaged. They are built to be used, not admired. Fill them in here in your browser, where your work saves to this device as you type, and then print a clean page or download the plain text.
Nothing you type is sent anywhere. The page makes no request to any other host, and the only copies of your answers are the ones you print or download. Each template also carries a prompt, so that you can build it with an AI assistant of your choosing instead of by hand.
01 · The template
The One-Page Culture Map
The builder's set · I want to build my own
Imagine you’re hiring someone brilliant for a customer-facing role, and the only thing they’ll read before they start speaking for you is one document. What’s in it? Your agent is that new hire. This is that document.
Write the operational truth, not the marketing version. The seven prompts below are what an agent needs to represent your organization authentically.
Chapter 10 · Culture First · the essay Act Like Us
Not the line on the wall — the decision filter. Why does this organization exist? What would be lost if it disappeared tomorrow?
Every organization has declared values and practiced values. Encode the ones you actually live when the declared ones are inconvenient.
Not just the words — the register. Formal or casual? Warm or efficient? Do you use humor, and when? When a customer is frustrated, what does the first response sound like?
When two priorities collide — speed vs. thoroughness, the customer vs. the policy, this quarter vs. the relationship — which wins, under what conditions, and who decides?
Most organizations can describe failure. Far fewer can describe excellence. Name the thing that, when it happens, makes you think: that’s exactly how we do things here.
Not the legal lines — those are table stakes. The identity lines. The things you’d never do, that define who you are by defining what you refuse.
Customers, employees, partners, suppliers, the community. Not a stakeholder analysis — a relationship map. The quality and character of how you relate to each group you touch.
Build it with your AI
Filling a form by hand is the analog way. If you would rather build this with an AI assistant, copy the prompt below into it. The prompt carries this template's questions and anything you have typed above, and it asks the assistant to interview you one question at a time and then write the finished document for you to keep.
Read the prompt first
02 · The template
The Trusted Living Agent Manifest
The builder's set · I want to build my own
A manifest is the document an agent carries with it — the answer to five questions that travels everywhere the agent goes. If the “organization” is just you, the manifest gets smaller, not different: a single page that says who your agent is when it acts under your name.
It’s meant to be portable, auditable, revocable, and versioned. Fill the five sections below.
Chapter 12 · The Trusted Living Agent Manifest
1 · Who is it?
Identity, in three layers: the virtues it carries, the role it plays, and the personality it shows.
Of the 15 Virtues, which ones is this agent built to embody? Not all fifteen apply to every agent. Name the ones that define this one. (Score an existing agent in template 03 below.)
What was this agent built to do? Who does it serve? What decisions does it own, and what does it escalate?
Its tone, voice, and cadence with humans — so the working relationship is one people want to come back to.
2 · What can it do?
The authority map. What it can access, read, write, and decide on its own — and what needs a human first.
3 · Who authorized it?
The chain of accountability. Who approved it, who certified it ready, who answers for its behavior.
4 · What are its limits?
Not what it can do — what it must not. The prohibitions and the triggers that make it stop and ask. The sacred lines from your Culture Map, turned into constraints.
5 · What’s its history?
The audit trail. Every version, every change to its authority, every certification — added to, never overwritten.
Build it with your AI
Filling a form by hand is the analog way. If you would rather build this with an AI assistant, copy the prompt below into it. The prompt carries this template's questions and anything you have typed above, and it asks the assistant to interview you one question at a time and then write the finished document for you to keep.
Read the prompt first
03 · The diagnostic
The 15 Virtues Diagnostic
The builder's set · I want to build my own
Take an agent you’ve already deployed and score it — honestly — against the fifteen virtues of a trusted living agent. Where does it excel? Where does it fall short? Where’s the gap between what it does and what a trusted colleague would do?
1 = absent · 5 = a trusted colleague would do exactly this. The gaps are your build list.
Chapter 11 · The 15 Virtues of Living Agents · the essay What an Agent Should Be
Score each virtue to see where this agent stands.
Build it with your AI
Filling a form by hand is the analog way. If you would rather build this with an AI assistant, copy the prompt below into it. The prompt carries this template's questions and anything you have typed above, and it asks the assistant to interview you one question at a time and then write the finished document for you to keep.
Read the prompt first
04 · The checklists
The Build Checklists
The builder's set and the operator's set
The book doesn’t hand you a single checklist — it hands you a sequence and a rhythm. Three of them, at three scales: how you stand an agent up, how you keep it honest day to day, and what every new agent passes through before it ships. Tick them off as you go.
Chapters 10, 14 & 15
The Deployment Sequence
The order matters. Skip a step and you’ll build it anyway — later, more expensively, after the first agent does something that makes a customer wonder if anyone there has ever met a human being.
The Daily Review (Minimum-Viable Air Traffic Control)
Not a dashboard, and not the every-decision review. A fifteen-minute look at the patterns and the exceptions, coffee in hand. Consistent, honest, and brief — that’s where real-time visibility begins.
The Deployment Gate
Governance as a design discipline, not a gate at the end. Every new agent starts here — these are the things that must exist before it ships.
Build it with your AI
Filling a form by hand is the analog way. If you would rather build this with an AI assistant, copy the prompt below into it. The prompt carries this template's questions and anything you have typed above, and it asks the assistant to interview you one question at a time and then write the finished document for you to keep.
Read the prompt first
05 · The register
The agent register
The client's set · I run a company
The first step of the method, Ground, ends with a register of every agent, tool and vendor in the business, with a named person beside each one. This is a plain version you can fill in for your own firm before anyone is engaged. Write down what is running, what each one does, who owns it, which vendor it depends on, what data it touches, and how much a human is in the decision.
The rows with no owner are the finding. Anything found, sanctioned or not, is placed, not punished.
Strategy 1.0, step 1, Ground · the seventh trust: a named person owns every agent
| Agent or tool | What it does | Named owner | Vendor | Data it touches | Decision tier | Status | Remove |
|---|
Build it with your AI
Filling a form by hand is the analog way. If you would rather build this with an AI assistant, copy the prompt below into it. The prompt carries this template's questions and anything you have typed above, and it asks the assistant to interview you one question at a time and then write the finished document for you to keep.