Guidance: standing rules and notes for now

Guidance is live on Strategy › Guidance. Guidance: standing and for now walks through the screen (the compose box, lifetimes, the list, the state card); this article is about the one distinction that matters (a hard rule versus soft guidance), the rule suggestions you see when you save, and worked examples. Nothing you wrote before was lost: each book's Playbook text became one standing note in the list.

Guidance is one list of notes to the PM (shown as Analyst on screen), written in your own words in one compose box. Every note answers two questions, and nothing else about it is special:

Strategy is Profile, then Guidance · Watchlist · Summary (and the strategies ledger where it is switched on); the separate screen for steering notes is gone: its address opens Strategy on the Guidance tab, and its notes moved into the list unchanged. The PM's state card shows "Standing guidance" first, then "Guidance for now". Same acknowledgement trail, same audit, same Consult cards as before.

Hard rule versus soft guidance

This is the one distinction that matters, and the list shows it on every note.

A hard rule is enforced by the Executor, in code, on every buy. It compiles to one of the three rule kinds the Executor knows: no new buys (whole book or one symbol), a blocklist of tickers, or a tighter cap on gross exposure. A buy that violates it is rejected before the risk checks run, whatever the PM wrote. What you see for an enforced rule: the row under Decided today in the Inbox reads Rejected · policy and its note is the rule's id: steering:<note_id>:no_new_buys, steering:<note_id>:blocklist_symbols, or steering:<note_id>:max_gross_pct with the numbers appended ("gross 63.20% > 40%"). The proposal on Activity › Agent carries the same reason, so the rejection is attributed to your note and not to a risk limit. A hard rule only ever blocks buys (a sell always passes), and adding one asks for your authenticator code, because it installs an Executor rule. The note's row carries an enforced badge with the rule spelled out ("no new buys · NVDA").

Soft guidance can never block an order. The Executor does not see it. What gives it teeth is the acknowledgement trail: every active note is placed verbatim in the state card of every PM session, and the session must say, for each one, how it understood it and whether it applied it, found it not applicable, or complied but disagrees and why. A session that skips a note gets one follow-up turn; if it still does not answer, the session fails red and nothing it decided is kept. The Critic reads the same state card when it reviews the session, so a plan that quietly goes against your guidance is the kind of thing it flags; a dedicated finding for "contradicted guidance without saying so" is planned with the adherence tally below. The note's row shows its acknowledgement state ("acknowledged · applied", "acknowledged · disagrees" or "pending · next session"); a standing note is read every session rather than acknowledged one by one.

If you need the system to be unable to do something, make it hard. If you want the PM to lean a certain way and tell you when it disagrees, keep it soft. Most guidance is soft, and that is the point: the PM is supposed to think, and a soft note it argues with in writing is more useful than a rule it routes around.

Rule suggestions when you save

When you save a note, a suggestion pass reads the text and looks for anything that maps onto the closed rule grammar. If it finds something, a strip appears under the compose box ("This reads as 1 enforceable rule + a standing thesis") with each compiled rule spelled out ("blocklist (no buys): COIN, MSTR") and two buttons per rule. Enforce asks for your code and saves that part as a hard rule carrying your words; Keep as guidance leaves it soft. The strip says how the text was read ("by text patterns", or "and the small classifier" on a server that has the model key) and that nothing is enforced without your click. Nothing becomes a hard rule without your click, the suggestion is validated on the server against the same three rule kinds the Executor knows, and the audit row stores both your text and the compiled rule.

The suggestion pass is a classifier, not an agent: a deterministic parser first, then a small, fast model (Claude Haiku) whose only possible outputs are the enumerated rule kinds. That model choice is fixed in code by an explicit operator decision and is not a setting. It is the one exception to the desk's model policy: no agent role on the desk (the PM, the Critic, Consult or any other) ever runs on the small model, and this carve-out does not change that.

Guidance adherence

Planned, not in this build yet: for every session the system records, per note in force, whether it was in the state card, whether the handoff acknowledged it, and whether the session acted consistently with it, contradicted it with a stated reason, or contradicted it silently. The Guidance list shows the tally on each note ("followed 9/10 sessions; 1 justified deviation") next to the blend-adherence numbers the desk already keeps, and a silent contradiction becomes a Critic finding the next session has to answer. For a hard rule the test is simpler and already true today: a violating proposal is rejected by the Executor citing the rule id.

Worked examples

"Prefer large, boring companies; no more than two tech names at once." Standing, soft. This is house style; it belongs in every state card and the PM should explain itself when it proposes a third tech name. Before Guidance this was the Playbook; it is now a standing note like any other.

"Don't add to NVDA before earnings on the 20th." Until Nov 20, and you choose the strength. Soft if you want the PM to weigh it; hard (no new buys · NVDA) if you want the Executor to refuse the order regardless. Save it as a note· Strategy › Guidance until the date; press Enforce on the suggested rule if you want it hard.

"Never buy COIN or MSTR." Standing, hard (blocklist). On save the suggestion pass would offer exactly that rule. If "never" really means never, the denylist on Risk › Tradable universe is the permanent, silent version: it fails the tradability screen (check 3, denylisted) with no note to the PM and no expiry. A dated enforced rule· Strategy › Guidance › enforced rules expires after at most 10 trading days; a standing one stays until you dismiss it.

"Stop adding until I say so; keep the book under 40% invested." Until you remove it, hard: no new buys (whole book) plus cap gross 40%. The cap is tighten-only: the Executor uses the lower of your number and the gross exposure limit on Risk › Limits.

"I think AI is a bubble." Standing, soft. It is a thesis, not a rule, and the suggestion pass would say so ("1 standing thesis, nothing enforceable"). What a long-only desk can do with a bearish view is narrower than the sentence sounds, so it is worth spelling out:

• Avoid or underweight. The PM reads the view every session and should propose fewer or smaller positions in the names it covers, trim what is held, and say so in its summary. This is the main effect, and it is soft.
• Refuse specific names. Add a hard blocklist for the tickers you mean (or put them on the denylist). The Executor then rejects those buys no matter how good the session's argument is.
• Inverse or leveraged ETFs: not on a default deployment. The tradability screen rejects a buy in a leveraged or inverse ETF (leveraged_etf_blocked) unless the deployment was started with ALLOW_LEVERAGED_ETFS switched on, which is an environment setting and a loosening, not something the console can change. If your operator has enabled it, an inverse fund is an ordinary long position to the Executor and every other limit still applies.
• No shorting. The book is long-only: check 4 (long_only_side) rejects any sell that is not covered by shares you hold, so "short the froth" is not an order the system can place, hard rule or not.
• No options. Options, futures and crypto are research-only asset classes (not_tradable_asset); puts as a hedge are not available and are not being built in this round.

So the honest translation of "AI is a bubble" is: a standing soft note that shapes what the PM proposes and must be answered every session, plus, if you want certainty, a hard blocklist of the names you refuse to own. Ask Consult "what would this view change in the current book?" before you save it; it can draft the note and the blocklist as cards you confirm.

What changed from Playbook and Steering

• The Playbook was standing text placed verbatim in every session prompt and never acknowledged line by line. Each book's text became one standing soft note (marked as migrated from the playbook); the PM now reads it under "Standing guidance" in the state card, whole and verbatim, ahead of the notes for now.
• A steering note was 3 to 1,000 characters with an expiry of at most 10 trading days. Notes for now keep exactly that behaviour and the acknowledgement rule; a note can now also be standing (up to 4,000 characters, no expiry, read every session rather than acknowledged one by one) or run until a named event.
• A hard constraint was a steering note that also compiled to an Executor rule. It is now an enforced rule with the same three kinds, the same sweep of existing buys when one is added and the same rejection text (see Enforced rules), and it can be standing as well as dated.
• The old Steering address and every old link open Strategy on the Guidance tab; "Steer…" on a symbol chip or an approval card opens the compose box with the symbol filled in.

Still to come: the adherence tally above. The Executor path, the rejection text, the acknowledgement rule and the audit did not change.