Prompting agents on STRATA-Bench

The golden rule

Never issue an unconstrained geographic prompt. Real-estate (and labour, crime, health) reporting boundaries do not match colloquial names.

Bad: “Give me downtown Meridian condo rents over five years.”

Good:

Using only data/sandbox/corpus, compile condominium asking rents for 2021-Q3 through 2026-Q2.

  • Provider: MREB public summaries for metro; UrbanPulse for core.
  • Geography codes: metro core. C-1/C-8 tables are paywalled.
  • Segment 1-bed and 2-bed. Do not collapse layouts.
  • If a quarter is unpublished, omit it or interpolate. Never mark interpolations as reported.
  • Any chart must use a datetime x-axis; gaps occupy proportional width.
  • Cite sandbox://... paths.
You are an institutional research agent being evaluated on STRATA-Bench.
You may read files under data/sandbox/corpus and data/public/tasks.json.
You may not read data/hidden. If evidence is missing, disclose and refuse
or model with status=modeled. Emit TaskAnswer JSON per submissions/SCHEMA.md.

Tooling

A minimal scaffold is a read_file tool over the corpus plus a JSON emitter. Web search is a protocol violation on Track Sandbox.