Guides

Telling it what you want

There is no syntax to learn. Type the instruction, or steer the draft in plain words — and the things you keep asking for become rules.

Minne has no sigil, no slash command, no magic prefix. There are three ways to say what you want, and all three are ordinary English.

#Type the instruction into the field

Put what you want in the field itself and tap the key. Because there is text and nothing selected, Minne reads it as an instruction to carry out and replaces the whole field with the result.

say yes but push it to Thursday

three bullets on where the migration stands, for Ada

polite decline — I'm out that week

The instruction never survives; the answer takes its place.

#Steer the draft once you can see it

When the panel says Draft ready, press ⇥ (or click the field at the bottom of the panel) and say what to change:

shorter

warmer, and mention the Thursday deadline

in Swedish

drop the apology

Return submits it. Shift-Return gives you a newline. Escape closes the field and leaves the draft as it stands.

Steers accumulate. Ask for shorter, then warmer, and you get both — the ones in force are shown as chips above the field. What the model is told is to revise the draft it already wrote: change what you asked for, and leave the wording, the facts and the length you did not mention alone.

#Steering is not the same as another take

⌘R — another take — asks for a different draft: a different angle, a different opening, a different shape, explicitly not a paraphrase of the one you just read. Earlier steers still apply, and a regenerate never counts as a new instruction.

Use ⌘R when the draft is wrong. Use ⇥ when it is nearly right.

#Edit it yourself

⌘E, or a click on the draft text, turns the panel into an editor with the whole draft in it. Return inserts what is on screen — as edited. Shift-Return is a newline, Escape leaves the editor and keeps your changes.

Everything downstream works on the edited text: press ⌘R after editing and Minne writes another take on your version, not on its own.

This matters more than it looks, because of what happens next.

#What you keep asking for becomes a rule

Minne counts. Not the words of your drafts — those are compared once and forgotten — but the shape of what you keep correcting, per context.

Repeated steers. Ask for shorter three times on the same site or in the same app and it becomes a standing rule on that context's style page, written in your own words:

## Standing guidance

- Shorter — asked 3 times

From then on it rides into every draft for that context, and you stop typing it.

Repeated edits. When you edit a draft before inserting it, Minne compares what it wrote against what you actually sent and records the difference as a feature from a fixed vocabulary of ten — trimmed, grew, greeting removed, sign-off added, exclamations removed, switched to Swedish, and so on. Never the text; only which of those ten it was. A feature that has been corrected three times and happens more often than you accept drafts untouched becomes a rule in the same section.

Three trims against ten clean inserts is taste, not a rule. Accepting drafts as they come retires rules that no longer hold.

#The context a rule belongs to

The domain when the press had a URL, otherwise the app — narrowed by recipient when the window title names one. So a rule you set while writing on x.com does not follow you into Mail, and how you write to one person in Slack can differ from how you write in the channel.

#Where those rules live, and how to change them

In ## Standing guidance on wiki/style/style-<context>.md. They are written deterministically — never paraphrased by a model — and there are at most eight per page.

Edit the section by hand and Minne works with what it finds. Delete a rule you disagree with and it stays gone until the habit recurs, which is the feature: you asked again.

The counters themselves live outside the wiki, in ~/Library/Application Support/Minne/sync-state.json, so an agent rewriting a style page cannot erase what has been learned.

#Steering the whole memory instead

Everything above is per-context and learned. To change what Minne keeps in the first place — what is worth a page, how pages should be shaped, what to ignore entirely — edit SCHEMA.md, which is yours and which Minne never rewrites. See Steering with SCHEMA.md.