Three Ways to Change What You Get, Ranked by What Each One Overrides
You got an answer that was not what you wanted, and there are three places you could go and change something: the dials, your custom instructions, and the greeting your companion opens with. This site has a piece explaining what each of those is. What it has never said is which one wins when they disagree, and that is the question you actually have when an answer lands wrong. Here it is, read out of the code that assembles the conversation.
The Order Is the Answer
Everything your companion is told before it replies is assembled in a fixed sequence. Twelve blocks, always in the same order, and the position of each one decides what it can and cannot talk over. Three of those positions are yours:
Position 7: your dials
Warmth, verbosity, playfulness and the rest arrive early, as broad direction. They shape how everything after them is expressed. Being early is what makes them feel like a personality rather than a rule.
Position 10: your custom instructions
Later, and therefore more specific and more decisive. If your instructions and your dials point different ways, your instructions arrive last and read as the more particular request. This is the lever for a thing you want done rather than a way you want it done.
Position 11: the safety rails
After both. This is the one you cannot move, and you would not want to. Whatever you have set in positions 7 and 10, the rails come after them.
So the practical rule is short. Dials shape. Instructions direct. Rails decide. If you have been fighting a dial to get a specific behaviour, you have been using the wrong control, and moving that request into your instructions will do more than another quarter turn on a slider.
Which One to Reach For
Match the lever to the shape of the problem
Every answer feels wrong in the same way — too long, too breezy, too intense. That is a dial. You are describing a tendency, and a tendency is what the dials are for.
One particular thing keeps happening or keeps not happening. That is an instruction. Name it plainly and put it there rather than trying to find the slider that implies it.
The problem is how conversations start. That is the greeting, and it is a different mechanism entirely — it applies to a first meeting rather than to every reply, so changing it will do nothing to a conversation already in progress.
How the Dials Actually Behave, Which Is Not Continuous
This is the part worth knowing and the part nobody would guess from looking at a slider.
A dial does not send a number. It falls into a band, and the band becomes a sentence. Warmth at the top of its range produces one instruction, warmth in the upper-middle produces a gentler one, and warmth near the bottom produces a reserved one. Between those bands, a dial in the middle of its range says nothing at all, deliberately: a neutral setting is neutral, and adding a sentence about it would be inventing a preference you did not express.
Which means small movements often do nothing and crossing a threshold does everything. If you nudged a dial and saw no change, that is very likely why, and the fix is a bigger move rather than a more patient one.
Fixed today: four dials had a bottom setting that could never fire
Checking every claim above against the code turned up a real one. Four of the fourteen dials tested their second-lowest band before their lowest, and because those tests run in sequence the lowest one was unreachable. Dragging warmth, verbosity, playfulness or dominance all the way down produced the same instruction as leaving it a little above the floor. The strongest version of each of those four settings has never actually been sent.
That is fixed as of today, and the four now do what their position on the slider says. If you had one of them pinned at the bottom and felt it was not quite landing, that was this, and it was not you misreading it.
What Sits Between Them
The three positions above are not next to each other, and one of the blocks in between changes how you should think about the ordering.
What your companion remembers arrives at position 9, after your dials and just before your custom instructions. That ordering has a practical consequence. If something remembered about you is steering an answer in a direction you do not want, an instruction is the control that can speak to it, because instructions arrive after it. A dial cannot, because dials arrive well before it and only describe a manner. This is the same rule as before, applied to a case that feels different: later is more specific, and more specific wins.
Position 8 covers what your companion can and cannot do, which is why asking it to do something outside that in your instructions produces a polite decline rather than a new capability. And the twelfth and last block is the conversation itself. Everything in this article is standing setup that is assembled fresh before every reply, which is also why changing any of it applies from your next message rather than to the ones already sent.
What None of Them Reach
Three honest limits, because a guide to levers that does not say where the levers stop is a sales page.
None of them is retroactive. All three shape what happens next. A conversation already in progress carries what it was given at the time.
None of them moves the rails. Position 11 is after position 10 by design, and no phrasing in your instructions changes that ordering.
And a dial is not a personality transplant. The role you chose sits at position 1, before all of this. The dials and instructions adjust how that role speaks; they do not replace it. If the shape of the thing is wrong rather than the tone, the change you want is a different companion, not a different setting — and the piece on what each control is covers where that line falls.
The Short Version
Three levers, one ordering
Dials arrive early and shape everything after them. Instructions arrive later and win where the two disagree. Safety rails arrive after both and are not negotiable. Dials work in bands rather than smoothly, so a small nudge often does nothing and crossing a threshold does everything. The greeting is a separate mechanism that only applies to a first meeting. And as of today, the bottom setting on four of the dials does what it says.
Set It the Way You Want It
All three live in one place, and now you know which one to reach for.
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