Constraints and agent guidance

Two tabs under Governance. Constraints are the rules. Agent guidance is the house style behind the rules.

Constraints

The tab is about one thing: what your company must never be made to say.

Field	What it holds
Claims allowed	Things that are true and that agents may state freely
Claims to avoid	Things agents must never claim, in the exact wording you would use to forbid them
Restricted topics	Subjects to stay off entirely
Sensitive areas	Subjects that need care rather than avoidance
Regulated industry flags and Regulatory constraints	The rules your industry puts on you
Required disclaimers	Text that must accompany certain claims
Brand safety notes	The judgement call, in prose, for everything a list cannot cover

Alpenglow’s claims-to-avoid list is the model for how specific these should be:

• Never claim offline maps work without an initial download
• Never claim trail conditions are live or real time
• Never promise a route is safe, passable, or in condition
• No comparison to a named competitor without a link to the evidence

Each one names a claim someone would plausibly make and that would be wrong. A rule like “do not overpromise” reads well and constrains nothing.

Its brand safety note carries the judgement a list cannot: “Hiking goes wrong for real people. Never use an accident, a rescue, or a closure as a hook.”

Constraints inform agents, they do not enforce

This is context every agent reads before it writes, not a filter applied after the fact. Nothing here blocks a publish on its own. What does stop work is the autonomy ladder, which is what holds a publish for approval, and your review. Write constraints so an agent gets it right, and keep the gates for the times it does not.

Agent guidance

The same tab set, one over: how agents should work, in your words.

• Default agent instructions are standing orders on every piece of work. Alpenglow’s include “Lead with what the hiker gets, not with the mechanism” and “Say what a feature does not do in the same breath as what it does”.
• Assumptions to prefer and Assumptions to avoid settle the questions agents would otherwise guess at. Alpenglow prefers “the reader has planned a hike before and has never heard of us” and avoids “that everything on the roadmap has shipped”.
• Output structure and Detail level set the default shape: bullets or narrative, concise or detailed.
• Glossary is the term list, each with your definition. This is where you fix the words that mean something particular in your product. Alpenglow defines trip, trail segment, and cached trip.

Which tab does a rule belong on?

A rule that protects you from being wrong is a constraint. A rule about how you would rather things be written is guidance. When you are unsure, ask what happens if an agent breaks it: if the answer is “we would have to correct it publicly”, it is a constraint.

Keeping them current

Both tabs are edited directly, and both are the ones agents most often propose changes to, because a meeting is where a new “never say this” gets decided. Those arrive as proposals rather than as edits.

Next steps

• Review agent proposals: where a proposed new rule lands.
• The autonomy ladder: what actually stops an action.
• Identity and voice: banned phrases live there, not here.