Definition
Plain language
The piece of agent expertise that's about which approach to take and when to give up and try something else.
As stated in the literature
In QUEST's decomposition of expert demonstrations, the part of agent skill capturing high-level planning, exploration policy, and multi-step structure; distinguished from the interaction prior and not learnable purely from environment feedback.
Why it matters: Without it, agents can execute individual steps competently but flail at the high-level question of which approach to try and when to switch.
For example, an expert chess player's sense of when to abandon a line of attack and reposition is strategy prior, not just move-by-move skill.
Heard on the show
“The other is a *strategy prior* — what should I try first, when should I give up and try another angle, how do I structure a multi-step task.”Episode 084 — Terminal Agents Get Free Supervision From The Tokens We've Been Throwing Away