Account-level instructions for agentic chat, not just per-conversation

There's a request from June for a prompt box on agentic chat (https://veniceai.featurebase.app/p/prompt-option-for-agentic-chat). Filing this separately because that one's five months old with no movement, and the part I actually care about is the part it doesn't cover: instructions that persist across conversations instead of being set per chat.

Two separate things here and they should both happen. One is a prompt box on agent chat for the current conversation. The other, and this is the one that actually matters to me, is instructions that stick around so I'm not pasting the same paragraph into every new chat. I've got about a page of standing stuff. Tone, project conventions, a couple of hard formatting rules. Right now it lives in a text file and I paste it every single time. That's the whole annoyance.

On building it, a few things I'd guess matter.

Put whatever the user writes underneath the agent's own setup prompt, don't replace it. The tool definitions and the approval flow need to stay where they are.

It probably has to get sent to every model the agent might touch, not just the text model, because a turn can bounce through an image model or the upscaler. Those handle system prompts differently, and a sloppy instruction block turns into bad tool calls pretty fast. Short and tight beats long.

Make it visible. Show it on the approval card so I can see what's actually going in with the request.

And let me seed the box from one of my Characters, instructions plus context files, instead of starting blank.

The privacy part is easy for once. It's just text sitting on my machine and getting prepended. No profile on a server, no memory system, nothing to store. Different animal from how ChatGPT does it.

Worth saying too, the current workaround is characters, and the instructions field gets followed pretty loosely. The context file upload is what actually holds up. Copy that mechanism instead of a single textarea.

Classic chat already does this. It's a parity thing.