Write guidance for your AI tools
Give Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and Codex standing instructions for yourself or your team, and restore earlier versions.
Guidance is a set of standing instructions that Tokenize adds to people's AI tools, such as "Prefer focused tests. Ask before changing shared config." You can write guidance for yourself, and managers and admins can write it for a team.
Who can do this: Everyone can edit their own personal guidance. Managers can edit guidance for teams in their reporting line. Admins can edit guidance for any team. See Roles and permissions.
Open the editor
- Go to Guidance in the sidebar.
- Choose a tool: Claude Code, Claude Cowork, or Codex. Each tool has its own guidance, version history, and limits.
- Under Editing, choose Personal or a team. You only see teams you can edit.
Click Learn more in the editor for a short explanation of where the current guidance goes.
Personal guidance
Personal guidance applies only to your own sessions. Write your instructions and click Save. Personal guidance can be up to 4,000 characters per tool.
Team guidance
Team guidance applies to everyone in the team, including people in teams underneath it. Write the instructions and click Publish. Team guidance can be up to 5,000 characters per tool.
If a team has no members, you see "Nobody is in this team or teams underneath it, so publishing here reaches no sessions."
Teams come from your directory. See SSO and directory sync.
How guidance is layered
Each person's session gets the team guidance first, then their personal guidance. Saving personal guidance never changes the team's text, and publishing team guidance never changes anyone's personal text.
If a person is in a sub-team, Tokenize uses the guidance from the closest team that has published some. A sub-team's guidance replaces its parent team's guidance for that sub-team's members. It isn't added on top.
If your personal guidance disagrees with your team's, you see "Your guidance disagrees with team [name]'s". Both texts still reach your sessions and the model picks a side, so edit one of them to resolve it.
When each tool picks it up
Guidance is delivered by the Tokenize desktop app, so each person needs it installed and signed in. See Install Tokenize on your computer.
| Tool | Where guidance goes | When it applies |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | Added at the start of each new session. | The next time a session starts. |
| Claude Cowork | Added to a Tokenize-managed section of the person's claude.ai settings. Anything they wrote there themselves stays unchanged. | The next time the device syncs. |
| Codex | Added to the person's global Codex instructions. Project instructions can override it. | New tasks after the next successful device sync. |
Claude Code sessions and Codex tasks that are already running keep the guidance they started with.
For Claude Cowork, deleting team guidance stops future updates but doesn't remove text that was already delivered. For Codex, when no guidance remains, the next sync removes only the Tokenize section.
History and Restore
Every save or publish creates a new version.
- Click the history icon in the editor.
- Expand a version to see its text and who made it.
- Click Restore on the version you want.
Restoring publishes that version's text again as a new version. Nothing in the history is deleted or rewritten. You can restore your own personal guidance and any team guidance you can edit.
Troubleshooting
"Your guidance changed somewhere else since you loaded this page." Someone saved a newer version while you were editing. Click Reload latest to load it. Reloading replaces your unsaved edits.
"You have unsaved changes to this team's guidance. Switching teams discards them." Publish your changes before you switch to another team, or confirm to discard them.