A coordinator instructs its document analysis subagent: "Open the first PDF, read pages 1–5, extract three statistics, then open the next PDF." When documents put key data in appendices or have fewer than five pages, the output is poor. What is the best change to the coordinator's prompt?

Answer: A — Specify the analysis goal and quality criteria, such as which data matters and how it must be cited

Coordinator prompts should specify goals and quality criteria rather than step-by-step procedures, so the subagent can adapt to what each document actually contains. More branches (b) keep the brittle script and will miss the next layout, forwarding full history (c) doesn't remove the script, and splitting steps (d) makes the procedure even more rigid.