Playbooks

The agent reads its operating rules at the start of every session. Those rules come from a playbook. This page explains what that is — and why it’s not something you need to manage.

A playbook is the agent’s standing rulebook: the operating instructions it loads at the start of every session, before it does anything on your site. It’s where the core behaviour comes from — how the agent works, the safeguards it follows, the conventions it applies. When Abilities & Sessions referred to the agent “loading its briefing” at bootstrap, the playbook is the briefing.

Playbooks ship with Maxi and are maintained as part of the plugin. They’re kept current automatically when you update Maxi. There is nothing for you to set up, edit, or manage — this is internal machinery, here so the rest of the documentation makes sense, not a task on your list.

This is also a useful distinction to keep clear: the playbook is the agent’s built-in rulebook, maintained by Maxi. Your own instructions go in operator notes (see The Notes System). One is the foundation Maxi provides; the other is how you layer your site’s specifics on top.

If something needs reinstalling

The built-in rules and playbooks are seeded automatically. In the rare case they’re missing — for example, if an action reports that rules or playbooks aren’t installed — the agent can reinstall the shipped defaults itself, with no input from you:

• Rules sync restores the built-in ability rules.
• Playbooks sync restores the built-in playbooks.

Both simply re-install what ships with the plugin and leave any custom additions untouched. If you ever see the agent run one of these, it’s performing routine self-repair, not making a change to your site.

In summary: a playbook is the agent’s built-in rulebook, loaded at the start of every session and maintained by Maxi. You don’t manage it. If the built-in rules or playbooks ever go missing, the agent can reinstall them itself through a sync — routine self-repair, nothing for you to do.