System Prompts

System prompts are where you move institutional knowledge from your team’s heads into the agent. The data model tells the agent what your data looks like — system prompts tell it how to think about your business: what terms mean, which rules always apply, how to handle edge cases, and how to format outputs in a way that makes sense for your users. Agent Studio exposes three separate prompt fields, each targeting a different part of how the agent works. All three are additive: your text is layered on top of Upsolve’s built-in system prompts, not substituted for them. The agent keeps its core capabilities — SQL generation, chart building, tool use — and your prompts steer how those capabilities are applied to your business.

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Agent system prompt

The custom system prompt is added to the general Upsolve agent system prompt. It shapes the agent’s overall behavior — its persona, its domain focus, and the business logic it should always apply. It’s the broadest of the three fields and the right place for: Business context and terminology Define the terms your team uses that don’t map directly to column names. If users ask about “revenue” but your underlying metric is gross_sales - refunds, say so here. If “active customers” has a specific definition in your business, encode it. Edge cases and business rules Describe situations the agent should handle in a particular way. For example: “When a user asks about quarterly performance, always use the fiscal quarter definition (Q1 starts February 1), not the calendar quarter.” Behavioral guardrails Set boundaries for what the agent should and shouldn’t do. For example: “Only answer questions about sales and revenue data. If a user asks about HR or payroll data, explain that this agent is scoped to revenue analytics.” Tone and response style Specify how the agent should communicate: level of detail in explanations, whether to proactively offer follow-up analysis, how to label charts, etc.

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SQL generation prompt

The custom SQL Generation Prompt is added to the general SQL generation system prompt and is injected specifically when the agent is constructing a SQL query. Use this to encode rules about how queries should be written against your specific database — things that are too technical for the main system prompt but critical for query accuracy. Good candidates for this field:

• Date/time handling rules (“Always use date_trunc('month', created_at) for monthly aggregations, not EXTRACT(MONTH FROM ...)”)
• Schema-specific join logic (“The orders table must always be joined to customers via customer_uuid, not customer_id”)
• Filtering defaults (“Always exclude test accounts where is_internal = true unless the user specifically asks about them”)
• Performance hints (“Prefer filtering on created_at rather than updated_at for large table scans”)

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Chart generation prompt

The custom Chart Generation Prompt is added to the general chart generation system prompt and is injected when the agent is building a visualization from query results. Use it to enforce formatting standards and chart conventions that should apply across all outputs. Examples of what belongs here:

• Currency formatting (“If a field contains monetary values — price, revenue, cost, sales, profit — always format as USD with two decimal places”)
• Axis and label rules (“Always include a date range label in the chart title when the query is time-bounded”)
• List formatting (“When presenting bullet points or numbered lists in analysis text, do not add unnecessary line breaks between items”)
• Color or chart type preferences (“Use bar charts for comparisons between categories; use line charts for trends over time”)

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The fourth prompt: Working Memory Template

There is one more prompt field, and it lives somewhere else: the Working Memory Template, accessible from the agent’s Memory tab rather than the System Prompts tab. It defines how the agent records each end user’s preferences — chart types, time ranges, output formats — and is stored alongside the other prompts. The default template works for most agents. See User Memory for what it records and when to customize it.

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Next steps