Instructions

An instruction is guidance the model receives on every turn in the scope it is added to, such as your company’s writing voice or release rules. There is no enable switch: an instruction is either added or it is not.

Instruction or skill?

Instruction text is sent on every turn, so more of it uses more of the context window and can raise token costs. Put guidance that matters only for particular tasks in a skill.

Layout

• Directoryinstructions/

  • Directorycompany-voice/

    • INSTRUCTIONS.md
  • Directoryrelease-practices/

    • INSTRUCTIONS.md

Each directory under instructions/ that holds an INSTRUCTIONS.md is one instruction. Directory names identify resources, not teams: instructions/engineering/INSTRUCTIONS.md does not assign anything to Engineering. The manifest’s optional instructions property can point at a different directory or an array of directories.

INSTRUCTIONS.md

instructions/release-practices/INSTRUCTIONS.md

---
name: release-practices
description: Follow the release checklist and report validation.
---

Summarise the change and its validation. Follow the release checklist before
publishing, and record unresolved limitations.

Field	Required	Limit
name	Yes	Lowercase letters, digits, hyphen or underscore, starting with a letter or digit, up to 64 characters. Cengrid lower-cases it before validating. Identifies the instruction across updates.
description	Yes	Up to 400 characters.
Markdown body	Yes	Up to 64 KiB. This is the text sent to the model.

Other frontmatter fields are ignored with a warning. The body must be plain text without NUL bytes.

How instructions apply

• Adding an instruction at the organisation applies it on every turn in the organisation. Teams inherit it.
• Adding one at a team applies it only in that team’s conversations.
• Cengrid combines all added bodies on every turn, organisation guidance before team guidance, each stable name once. They supplement the scope’s existing guidance.
• A team can remove an inherited organisation instruction, which returns it to that team’s Available view, unless the organisation chose Lock for every scope.
• Adding a plugin instruction to the organisation replaces team additions of the same instruction with organisation inheritance.
• Preview effective instructions shows the combined text for the selected scope.

Instructions are stored in Postgres. Imported instructions are read-only: edit INSTRUCTIONS.md in GitHub and re-sync.

Example

The product repository’s examples/standing-instructions plugin ships two instructions, company-voice to add at the organisation and release-practices to add to a team. See capability examples.