Core concepts

The Playbook

The Playbook is the list of documents your agency's work has to respect. Each entry is a rule: a document someone pointed at and said "this one counts".

Everything else Vythos holds — briefs, notes, emails, finished work — is memory. Memory is searched. The Playbook governs.

What's on the page

A rail on the left, in two parts. Your rules lists the categories that hold house rules. Below it, each client you've added, with the rules that apply only to them. Your rules come first because clients are the exceptions to them.

A count of active rules at the top, beside the Add rule button.

A row per rule, showing:

On the row	What it means
The title	Taken from the document's first heading, or the file's name
v2, v3 …	This rule has been amended. No badge means it's still at version 1
Value chips	Figures the rule states — a day rate, payment terms, banned words. A green border means a person confirmed them; a plain border means Vythos read them from the document. See Values
A summary line	The opening of the document

Open a row and you get the document's full text as Vythos reads it, a line telling you exactly how to update this particular rule, a link to the file where it lives, and the option to retire it.

An orange note appears on a rule whose document can no longer be read — it was deleted, or access was withdrawn. The rule keeps working; it just stops following the file until you fix it. See When a file can't be read.

Order matters

The Playbook is ordered, and the order is what your AI tools are given:

1. A client's rules beat your house rules. Always. If Acme's contract says 45 days and your terms say 30, work for Acme is on 45.
2. Within a scope, categories rank. Terms and commitments outrank pricing; pricing outranks process. Full order in Categories.
3. Rules beat memory. A rule is current and governed. A meeting note is what someone said once. Where they disagree, Vythos answers from the rule and tells you the note disagrees, so you can go and fix the note.

Who can change it

Today, the workspace owner adds and retires rules. Teammates can be given access to see particular categories — which decides what reaches them in Ask and in their own AI tools — but the Playbook page itself is the owner's.

Where you choose someone's access, the screen says which parts are active, so nobody is promised something the app doesn't do. See Your team and their access.

What a rule is made of

Part	Where it comes from
The document	A Google Drive file, a Notion page, or a file you uploaded
Its text	Read from that document, kept so Vythos can answer and compare without opening the file every time
Category	You chose it when adding the rule
Client	Every client, or one client you picked
Values	Figures Vythos read from the text, which you can confirm
Version	1 when added; +1 each time the document's wording changes
History	Every past version, kept — nothing is deleted

The one-document rule

One document makes one rule. File the same document under a second category and the first reading stands down rather than joining it, so a document can never be two competing rules at once.

That constraint is worth designing around: if a file covers both your pricing and your process, splitting it into two documents gives you two rules you can update, replace and retire independently.

Next: A rule is a document.