Otto keeps using a line you told him never to use: make it a House Rule so it sticks

Modified on Tue, 4 Aug at 1:28 PM

You edited a draft, told Otto to take one line out, and days later the same line is back word for word. "Some of my direct instructions for writing emails are getting ignored, repeatedly." "Otto keeps using a line I told him never to use." "I told it never to say that." The performer whose report led to this article told Otto on 1 July to take a representation claim out of a draft, saw the same claim come back on 18 July, killed it again, then watched the rebuild carry it once more on the 19th: "I kill it a third time." Same rule, in the same file, for 18 days.

The same problem gets described other ways: it forgets my rules, or, asked straight out, how do I make a rule permanent. Same answer for all of it. A ban on a phrase has one right home in Booked Solid, and it is not your voice file. It is your House Rules.

Why the rule is in the file but it gets ignored

Read this part before you go and fix anything, because it explains why the two obvious moves do not hold. Two separate things break a ban you have already written down.

A kill is a "no", and the capture steps only bank a "yes". On the older terminal setup (the Pearl-era Booking HQ), the one ritual that files anything asks you per line "Approved - yes or no?" and banks only the explicit yeses. A kill is a no, so it had nowhere permanent to land. It ended up in a learnings log line, or in the dated copy bank attached to the draft it came from, and never reached the hard rules that are read before the next draft is written. The Autopilot queue review is worse: walk the queue newest-first, approve, edit or skip, with no capture step at all - and that is exactly where the scheduled agent's drafts get ruled on. Every kill made there evaporated.
Size. A voice file at 110KB, with rules split between a hard rules section and a dated copy bank where live rulings sit inside notes about superseded drafts, comes apart past a certain point. That is the honest answer to "the rule is in the file but it gets ignored": being in a big file is not the same as being in front of Otto at the moment he writes.

So the first two things almost everyone tries are dead ends for a permanent ban. Hand-editing the offending line out of your voice file removes one example; it does not create a prohibition, and on a large file there is no guarantee the part carrying your note is the part that reaches the next draft. Telling Otto again in the next chat fixes that one conversation. Skip both and spend the same two minutes on the step below.

Put the ban in your House Rules

Open the Settings tab in the right pane. The panel is headed House rules & autonomy.
Stay on the General sub-tab. The house rules cluster sits near the top, just below the autonomy dial.
In the Your house rules box, type the ban in your own words, one rule per line. For the case above: never say "I book for..." or anything that claims representation.
Click anywhere outside the box. There is no Save button here - the box saves the moment you click away, and a small Saved marker appears next to the heading.

Other standing rules belong in the same box, in the same plain language: "never quote under $2,000", "always sound warm and short", "CC my manager on every reply". Otto obeys all of them whatever the autonomy dial is set to.

Why a House Rule sticks when a line in your voice file does not

Your House Rules are compiled into Otto's instructions on every single draft, and they sit closest to the task, so nothing crowds them out. They are loaded into the instructions every time rather than fetched out of a big file by search, which is why it does not matter how large your voice file grows. That is the whole difference between a rule that is written down and a rule that is in force.

They are stored as one file inside your Booking HQ, at _config/house-rules.md, so every face of Booked Solid reads the same list rather than each keeping its own idea of your rules.

The one-tap route: "Never (make it a rule)"

If the line you want dead is sitting on a decision card right now, you do not have to go to Settings at all.

Open Activity and pick the Board tab.
On the card, next to Not now, click Never (make it a rule).
The item goes on hold, and a dated Never line quoting the killed item word for word is filed into your House Rules as a pending hard rule.
Open Brain (in the More menu at the end of the tab row) and approve it: Make it so, then Yes, change my standing rule. Standing rules are confirmed twice on purpose, so one never shifts on a stray click.

Killed once, banned for good, with no hand wiring. The action appears on cards that are asking you to approve something - a plain heads-up card, or one handing you something to switch on yourself, has nothing to ban. It shipped on 23 July 2026, in version 1.11.8, so if you do not see it next to Not now, you are on an older build: let the app update itself, or get the current version at booked.kivimedia.co/download.

Or tell Otto in chat

The plainest route is to say it out loud: "never use that line again, make it my default", or simply "never say that again". Otto offers to make it a standing rule, and the change arrives as a proposal card in the Brain. Once you approve it with the same two taps, it is a hard rule with a saved history: every approved change lands in What's changed, so you can see the day a rule went in and click Put it back if you ever want it reversed. There is more on that flow in The Brain: what's working, and approving Otto's proposed changes.

A phrasing ban is not enforced at the Approve button

This is the part that sends people off in the wrong direction, so it is worth being exact. The house rules cluster has two halves, and they are enforced in two different ways.

Your house rules (the free-text box) is obeyed while Otto writes. A phrasing ban never shows up as a blocked button - it changes what comes out of the draft. Do not wait for a grayed-out Approve as proof your ban is working. Read the next draft instead.
Rules I enforce for you (your floor rate, never-contact list and follow-up cap) is checked at the Approve button and can stop a card dead.

Your floor rate

The floor rate is the minimum you are willing to quote. To set it:

Pick your currency from the select. Currencies are grouped by region, so scroll to your part of the world.
Type the amount in the field next to it. Leave it blank for no floor.

From then on, the floor rate is checked at every Approve button. If a parked quote or send comes in below your floor, the Approve button on that decision card is disabled, with a plain reason explaining why.

Never contact

The Never contact box is your do-not-contact list. Enter one name or email address per line. Like the floor rate, this list is enforced at approval time: a send addressed to anyone on the list cannot be approved, and the card tells you which rule blocked it.

Most follow-ups per lead

This control caps how many times Otto follows up with a single lead. You have two options:

Let Booked Solid OS decide - leave the toggle on and Otto picks a sensible number of follow-ups per lead.
Set your own cap - turn the toggle off and enter a numeric limit instead.

None of this is one-way. You can change any rule at any time, and the new rule applies from the next draft and the next approval onward.

Will an update wipe my templates folder?

No. This question comes from performers who came over from the terminal build, where hand-written rulings really did get overwritten. An app update replaces only the app itself. Your Booking HQ and every file in it, including a templates/ folder and any fix you wrote by hand, is left completely untouched. There is no replace list in the desktop app. The "one update and a month of rulings is gone" behaviour was the old terminal updater, not this app, so hand fixes are safe across updates here. There is more on the update itself in How updates work: the update badge and Restart & install.

If you are still working in the terminal

You are not stuck with two sets of rules. The app keeps a copy of your House Rules inside your booking folder's own CLAUDE.md, between two marked lines, so the terminal follows the same rules Otto does. Anything you have written in that file outside those two lines is left exactly as you wrote it. To teach a rule from the terminal, append it to _config/house-rules.md in your booking folder: Otto follows it on his very next message, with no restart and nothing to export.

If you are running the older terminal rituals and your kills keep evaporating at review time, this is the fix the reporting performer wrote for himself, and it is a good one:

Add a new step 2 to .claude/commands/sleep.md called Capture rulings and kills, and renumber what follows. It is a separate pass with a separate destination from the approved-copy step.
Have it scan the session for anything you ruled permanent - a kill, a ban, a standing constraint on how copy gets written - and ask you per line "Permanent rule - yes or no?".
Write the explicit yeses into the ## Hard rules section of _config/voice.md, dated, in your exact words. Rulings you make during a queue review count here too, since that ritual has no capture step of its own.
Keep it bounded, or it bloats the section it is protecting: only permanent never-do rules go there. Approved copy stays in the copy bank, contextual preferences stay preferences.
Propagate in the same pass, per the Retiring a line procedure in brain/systems.md: grep every template, control and stage file for the old string.

One warning, because it costs a month of work when it goes wrong. Mirror the procedure into brain/systems.md, which is protected, and not into AUTOPILOT.md. AUTOPILOT.md is on the terminal updater's replace list, so your edit there will be overwritten on the next update. The same goes for rulings written into templates/ as HTML comments: that folder is on the replace list too, which makes it a bad home for a permanent rule on the terminal build.

If the line still comes back

Check three things before anything else. The rule is in the Your house rules box and not only in a voice file. The pending Never proposal was actually approved in the Brain, because a filed proposal changes nothing until you approve it. And the draft you are reading was produced after the rule went in - a draft that was already sitting in the queue was written under the old instructions.

Still stuck? Submit a ticket from this help center with the exact line, the date you banned it, and where you banned it, and we'll take it from there.