Charter

The standing instructions an agent reads before it reads your message, every time.

Wherever they live — a settings box, a file on your own machine, a note you paste in at the start — the instructions you write are the charter, and the deck uses that one word for all three. A charter is where who your agent is for you actually holds. Memory advises and may not be reread; a conversation ends; a charter is present every time.

It is load-bearing because it is the lever. Behavior comes from layers — the maker's own instructions, trained habit, the charter, memory, the guards, the conversation — and talking touches only the last. A correction spoken lasts one conversation; a line written into the charter lasts. That is why every repair ends with a line installed where the next conversation will meet it, and why the improvement log counts a miss closed only when its fix sits there.

A Player+ writes a charter in few lines, each with its why, so the agent can judge the case nobody foresaw. Behaviors move an agent; adjectives barely do. Conditions that rest on what the person said work better than conditions that rest on what the agent believes about its situation. The person installs it by their own hand, reading every line, and tests in fresh conversations two or three times, because answers vary. When the agent drafts a change to its own charter, it shows the exact text and stops.

A charter is kept honest by pruning: once a month, line by line, ask of each why it exists, and cut what cannot answer. What must never happen belongs not in the charter but in the settings and guards around the agent, which are enforced rather than merely read. A permission written in a charter is not a permission in the machine.

Also called: standing instructions Stands on: Set-up · Principal · Agent Opens onto: Agent engineering · Memory (agent) · Prune · Change log · Drift · Safety check · Register In play: beyond Sources: The DNA of Heaven, Part X (the guard) · Player+ Modules, How an AI Agent Works, Agent Engineering, Advanced Agent Engineering, The Agent Improvement Process · lionsberg.wiki: Current Best Understanding. Open: the word also names a body's founding document in the canon's governance sense (a Community Company's nine-section charter); the two senses are unrelated and no page yet disambiguates them.