Instructions

Overview

Instructions is the simplest way to put fixed instructional material — style guides, project conventions, persona text — in front of the model on every turn. The content is loaded once by an async load function at init, wrapped in an XML tag, and returned verbatim from recall.

• Default slot: 105 (Slot.SCRATCHPAD + 5)
• Default scope: resource
• Budget: none declared (treated as 'auto')
• Placement: 'anchor' — the content is loaded once and never changes, so it belongs in the cache-stable prefix

Usage

import { instructions } from '@noetic-tools/core';

const conventions = instructions({
  id: 'project-conventions',
  tag: 'project_conventions',
  load: async () => readFile('CONVENTIONS.md', 'utf-8'),
});

The model then sees:

<project_conventions>
...file contents...
</project_conventions>

Configuration

interface InstructionsOptions {
  id?: string;            // default 'instructions'
  slot?: number;          // default Slot.SCRATCHPAD + 5
  scope?: ContextScope;    // default 'resource'
  load: () => Promise<string>;
  tag?: string;           // default 'instructions'
}

Behavior

• init — calls load() once and stores the content wrapped as <tag>...</tag>. An empty load result stores the empty string, and recall then contributes nothing.
• recall — returns the stored block as-is. When the content exceeds the allocated budget, it is trimmed to fit while keeping the XML well-formed: the text is cut to the budget (minus the closing tag) and the closing </tag> is re-appended.
• Zero budget fails open — a budget of 0 (or negative) skips the trim entirely and returns the full content rather than silently dropping load-bearing instructions.