--- title: Telling it what you want description: 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. :::warn Any text sitting in an unselected field is read as an instruction. If you have a half-written draft in there and you want it improved rather than replaced, **select it first** — a selection means rewrite, and only the selection is touched. ::: ## 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: ```markdown ## 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-.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. :::note Normalisation is mechanical: lowercase, collapse whitespace, drop trailing punctuation. `Shorter.` and `shorter` pool together; `shorter please` is a different steer. Phrase a habit the same way each time and it reaches the threshold sooner. A steer over 200 characters is treated as a one-off and never counted. ::: ## 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](/guides/schema).