Assistant prompt and priorities

Stable values, replaceable models

Unison assembles model instructions from reviewed layers

A shared base prompt, person-specific identity, current priorities, and authorized session context give models useful direction while platform services retain decision authority.

The prompt supports the experience

The base prompt describes Unison's interaction posture: understand intent, preserve continuity, communicate naturally, use available capabilities, respect privacy, and support the person's agency. It also distinguishes orchestration roles from person-facing language roles.

The exact base prompt lives with its implementation in unison-common. This page links to that source instead of maintaining a second copy that can drift.

Four layers shape the active instructions

  1. BaseShared Unison interaction principles and role-aware model guidance.
  2. IdentityPerson-specific communication, privacy, and challenge preferences validated against a versioned schema.
  3. PrioritiesMutable directives and current preferences that can evolve independently from identity.
  4. SessionAuthorized context for the current intent, role, modality, and operation.

The prompt engine validates identity and priority documents, compiles the active prompt, writes it atomically, and records a content hash for correlation. Prompt content stays out of ordinary observability records.

Models contribute within assigned roles

A language model can interpret, extract, synthesize, converse, or produce a typed proposal for the operation it receives. The orchestrator selects the role and supplies minimized context.

Identity, consent, policy, recipients, disclosure, capability grants, incident state, and physical action remain with their platform services. A prompt cannot grant a model additional data or authority.

Changes remain reviewable and reversible

The prompt engine supports proposed updates, schema validation, approval for sensitive changes, snapshots, application, and rollback. A person can adjust communication style or priorities without tying continuity to one model, provider, or hardware configuration.

Models can suggest a change. The resulting proposal remains separate from the decision to apply it.

Source and implementation

Item Location
Base prompt schemas/prompt/unison_base.md
Identity schema and defaults schemas/prompt
Priority schema and defaults schemas/prompt
Compilation and lifecycle unison_common/prompt

Consumers use the unison-common revision pinned by unison-workspace. Public explanation follows that implementation and does not replace its schemas or tests.