Skip to main content
Every knowledge base ships with capable, built-in answering behavior. Prompt settings let you shape that behavior — giving the assistant a voice, layering on rules, or taking complete control for a fully branded experience.

​
The prompt fields

Who the assistant is — its role, tone, and personality. For example, “a friendly support specialist for Acme’s billing team.”
Rules and guidance layered on top of the persona — what to always do, what to avoid, how to format answers, which topics to stay within.
A complete replacement for the built-in answering instructions, for white-label and fully branded assistants that need total control of behavior.

​
How the fields combine

This is the most important thing to understand about prompts, and it keeps the behavior predictable:

Persona + Instructions

Additive. They layer on top of AutoSage’s built-in answering behavior as authoritative overrides — the assistant still benefits from grounded retrieval and citations, now in your voice and within your rules.

Custom prompt

A full replacement. It takes over the built-in answering instructions entirely. When a custom prompt is set, the Persona and Instructions fields are not applied.
Persona and Instructions are mutually exclusive with a full Custom prompt. Use Persona + Instructions for most cases — it is the simplest way to shape the assistant while keeping AutoSage’s grounded answering intact. Reach for a full Custom prompt only when you need total control of the assistant’s behavior, and remember it takes over from Persona and Instructions. Put everything you need — voice, rules, and answering guidance — directly in the custom prompt.
Saving a field empty clears it. To go back from a full custom prompt to persona-and-instructions behavior, clear the custom prompt and the Persona and Instructions fields apply again.

​
Tuning Quick and Deep modes separately

AutoSage answers in two modes — Quick for fast responses and Deep for thorough, multi-step reasoning (see Answering modes). You can tune each independently:
​
Quick mode custom prompt
text
The standard custom prompt applies to Quick mode answers.
​
Deep mode custom prompt
text
The main custom prompt applies to Deep mode answers.
Because each mode has its own custom prompt, you can give a brief, snappy voice to Quick answers and a more detailed, methodical one to Deep answers within the same knowledge base.

​
Advanced fields for connected data

When a knowledge base has database connections, two more fields let you guide how the assistant works with live data:
​
SQL instructions
text
Guidance for how the assistant queries your connected data — which tables to prefer, conventions to follow, and constraints to respect.
​
Chart instructions
text
Guidance for how query results are visualized — preferred chart types, formatting, and labeling.

​
Next steps

Answering modes

See how Quick and Deep modes differ and when to use each.

Build an agent

Package your prompt settings into a deployable agent.