A small operator-written file handed to the model at the start of every
conversation — who you are, how this install is set up, what has already been
decided. Injected ahead of the retrieved passages and marked operator-authored
so it outranks anything they contradict, and never cited as a source.
Deliberately not indexed and deliberately under DATA_DIR: it changes
constantly, vector similarity is the wrong way to retrieve things you were
told to remember, and gitignoring it keeps personal notes out of a pushed
repository. The character cap is a context budget — this text costs its share
of 16k on every single turn.
Asked what was wrong, it answered "AI_ENABLED=false" — read from the conf
template, which records the shipped default, while the live value was true.
Passing checks are what tell the model the current value of a setting;
without them a documented default fills the silence. The prompt now states
explicitly that live state overrides any documented default.
The failures this subsystem actually has are configuration drift, so each
check names the setting to change rather than reporting that retrieval
failed. Notably it catches a conf model tag that is no longer installed, and
an index built by a different embedder than the one configured — vectors
from two models are not comparable, and that failure returns confident
nonsense rather than erroring. Diagnostic questions also get recent log
warnings, attached only then because they cost budget the passages need.
Token and poll rather than SSE, so the api layer keeps one response
convention and reuses the pattern manual_sync already proved. History is
capped at three turns because the model is only fully offloaded at 16384
context and unbounded history would cross that silently. The tab exists
only while AI_ENABLED is true, rejected server-side and not merely hidden.
Gmer4Lfe