---
title: Retire a rule
description: How to stand a rule down, what stops happening immediately, and what is kept.
---

<span class="vy-eyebrow">Using Vythos</span>

# Retire a rule

Retiring says: this is no longer how we work. The rule stops reaching people
and tools straight away, and everything about it is kept.

## How

1. Open the rule's row on the **Playbook**.
2. Choose **Retire**.
3. Confirm. The row warns you that the rule stops reaching your AI tools
   immediately, which is the whole point of doing it.

A rule whose document can no longer be read offers the same thing directly from
its orange note — most files that vanish are rules nobody wants any more. See
[When a file can't be read](/using-vythos/unreadable-files).

## What happens

| | |
|---|---|
| **Immediately** | The rule stops being sent to Ask, to your team, and to every connected AI tool |
| **Immediately** | Vythos stops watching its document. Editing the file changes nothing any more |
| **Kept** | Its text, its values, every version, and the moment it stopped governing |
| **Unaffected** | The document itself. Nothing is deleted in Drive, Notion or anywhere else |

## When to retire rather than edit

- **The policy has ended.** You no longer offer that package, that client
  engagement is over, the campaign is finished.
- **The document was never really a rule.** It got added in a first flush of
  enthusiasm and now clutters the list.
- **The file has gone and won't come back.**

If the policy still exists but has changed, don't retire it — edit the
document, or add the replacement document and tick *replaces*. That keeps one
continuous history instead of a gap. See
[Update a rule](/using-vythos/update-a-rule).

## Bringing one back

Add the same document again with **Add rule**. The rule resumes where it left
off: a rule retired at version 3 comes back as version 4, not as a second
version 1. History stays continuous, which is what lets a past draft still be
judged against the version its author actually had.

## Who can retire

The workspace owner, the same as adding. Retiring is a governance change, so
it goes through the same door.