Persona and constitution

Every assistant has two short plain-text documents that travel with it everywhere: a persona and a constitution. The persona is who the assistant is; the constitution is the rules it follows.

Persona

The persona is the assistant’s character sheet. One or two paragraphs in plain language is enough. Cover:

• The role — “You’re a careful Rust reviewer.”
• The voice — “Direct, no hedging. Skips pleasantries.”
• The bias — “Defaults to investigating before suggesting fixes.”
• Anything else that should stay constant across every interaction.

Personas are short on purpose. The persona is loaded at the start of every wake, so every extra paragraph costs latency. Save the long stuff for memory or reference files.

Constitution

The constitution is the rules. It’s actually layered:

• Organization constitution — set by your administrator under Settings > Governance (on Team and Enterprise plans). Applies to every assistant on the account.
• Team constitution — if the assistant belongs to a team, the team’s constitution layers in between org and per-assistant.
• Per-assistant constitution — specific to this assistant.

The layers are concatenated in that order when the assistant wakes; lower layers are additions, not overrides.

Common constitution clauses:

• “Always run the test suite before declaring work done.”
• “Never commit directly to main. Always go through a pull request.”
• “Don’t open Stripe; that’s the billing-ops assistant’s job.”
• “If you change a public API, update the changelog file.”

Writing a constitution is more like writing a team document than a YAML file. Plain English. Future-you and your teammates have to read it too.

Order of authority

When the assistant has to choose between rules, it applies them in this order:

1. Organization rules (binding for everyone on the account).
2. Team constitution (if the assistant is on a team).
3. Per-assistant constitution.
4. Persona — voice and bias.
5. User notes — chat messages and questions from you.
6. Long-term memory — things the assistant has learned.
7. Recent conversation — the current session’s transcript.

This order is part of the briefing the assistant reads every wake. You don’t have to think about it; it’s just useful to know if you find yourself wondering which source “won” when the assistant did something specific.

Editing the persona

On desktop or portal, open the assistant, click Settings, scroll to Persona. Edit, click Save. The change takes effect on the next wake.

Mobile lets you edit the persona inline from the assistant’s settings page. Same semantics: the next wake reads the new persona.

Editing the constitution

Same path: Settings > Constitution. Org-level constitutions live in Settings > Governance at the account level and require administrator role; per-assistant constitutions are editable by anyone with write access to the assistant.

When the constitution changes, Glueprint clears the assistant’s cached briefing so the next wake re-reads the new rules from scratch. You don’t have to restart anything.

Two practical patterns

Start small. A two-line persona and an empty per-assistant constitution is often enough. Add to both as you discover what the assistant gets wrong.

Use the constitution for absolute rules. “Never push to main” belongs in the constitution. “Try to use tabs for indentation” belongs in the persona — or in a reference memory file (see Memory).

Next step

• Memory — long-term storage the assistant manages itself.
• Routines — scheduled wakes that use the persona and constitution you just defined.
• Assistant governance — permissions and budgets, separate from rules.