Your Instructions, further down Settings > Assistant, is where you type standing rules in plain language instead of repeating yourself in chat. Each one is filed under a topic, and your assistant reads the ones that match whatever it's doing.
When You'd Use This
Write one the moment you catch yourself explaining the same thing twice - your email sign-off, what counts as urgent, or how hard to chase a borrower for a missing document. It's also worth a look before a new hire starts, so their first week matches everyone else's.
Writing Your First Instruction
Click Write an instruction for your assistant and type the rule as you'd say it - "Never open an email with 'I hope this finds you well.'" is the placeholder text, and that's the right length to aim for. Markdown works, and each line becomes its own rule rather than folding into one paragraph, so a short list reads back as typed.
An instruction can run up to 2,000 characters, though most useful ones are a sentence or two. Anything past 180 characters reveals a title field so you can find it again later - purely cosmetic, and you can title a shorter one by hand, too.
Choosing When It Applies
Every instruction is filed under one of six topics: Always, Writing to Clients, Assigning Tasks, Moving Deals Forward, Chasing Documents, and Dealing with Lenders. Pick whichever describes when the rule fires - tone under Writing to Clients, when a file's ready to advance under Moving Deals Forward. Always is read on everything your assistant does, so reserve it for rules with no exceptions. Each topic holds up to eight instructions before you need to edit or remove one.
Rules for Your Team or the Whole Brokerage
A new instruction applies to your team by default. Org admins get a second choice to set it for everyone at the brokerage, and a brokerage-wide instruction shows a small badge so nobody mistakes it for their team's own. Only an admin can create, edit, or remove a brokerage-wide instruction - a team instruction can be changed by anyone on that team, not only the broker.
Editing, Pausing, and Removing One
Hover an instruction to reveal pause, edit, and remove controls. Pausing keeps it on file but stops your assistant from reading it - better for a seasonal rule you'll want back later. Removing asks for confirmation first, since there's no way to recover it afterward.
Common Gotchas
An instruction never widens what your assistant may do on its own - it shapes how it does permitted work, while Decide What It May Do on Its Own still decides whether it can act without asking. Writing "always move a file to underwriting the moment conditions clear" doesn't grant automatic stage moves if that setting says otherwise.
This differs from what your assistant has picked up about you on its own: an instruction is a rule you deliberately typed, always read in full for a matching topic, not a pattern inferred quietly in the background. And when your assistant works a deal on someone else's team, it follows that team's instructions, not yours - helping on a colleague's file means working to their rules.
What to Do Next
- What Your Assistant Knows About You to see what it learns without being told.
- Decide What It May Do on Its Own to set the boundaries your instructions operate inside.
- Let Your Assistant Draft Replies to see instructions filed under Writing to Clients in action.