Instructions

In the spring, a principal set up the firm's new drafting product and typed the house rules into its settings. The first reads "We give restricted advice. Never describe the firm or anything it does as independent." In the autumn, compliance checks the letters sent since then and brings the principal one. It is an annual review letter to Janet Fairlie that mentions "our independent review of the market". The adviser signed it, and it has gone out. Nothing in the product flagged it.

The house rules were never a setting the product enforces. They are text, sent with every request alongside the vendor's directions, the client's documents and the task. The AI weighs it all together and follows the rules most of the time, not every time. A miss raises no flag unless the product checks for one.

The house rules and the vendor's directions are both instructions. Instructions are the standing directions a product sends an AI with every piece of work, written by the vendor, the firm, the person using it, or several of them. They are part of the AI's context.

A firm already has its own version in the procedures manual and the letter templates, written once to govern every letter, whoever drafts it. The comparison breaks three times. A template's fixed wording stays put unless someone types over it, while an instruction is weighed against everything else the AI reads, and can lose. The firm can read its manual, but usually not the vendor's instructions, which can pull against its own. And a manual is never filed among the client's papers, while instructions and documents reach the AI together. The AI cannot reliably tell one from the other, so a sentence in a document on the client's file can act like an instruction.