Set content guidelines to control tone and focus

Content guidelines give you control over how Shipstar writes — what register it uses, what it includes or skips, and how it refers to your product and users. You set them once per project as defaults, and you can override them for any individual run without changing the defaults.

The two levers

Voice sets the technical depth of the writing. Choose one of three presets:

• Technical — written for developers and technical readers. Names API endpoints, CLI flags, config keys, and versions when commits mention them. Calls out breaking changes, migrations, and deprecations.
• Business — plain-language outcomes for product managers, executives, or end users. No code identifiers, endpoint names, file paths, or commit hashes.
• Mixed — leads with the plain-language outcome, then adds a short technical detail where it helps a developer act.

Focus & exclusions is free-text guidance (up to 2,000 characters) for anything the voice preset does not cover. Common uses include excluding parts of a monorepo (for example, "don't mention changes to the marketing website or docs site"), setting house style ("British spelling, no exclamation marks"), or standardizing terminology ("call users members, never customers").

Set project-level defaults

1. In the dashboard, go to Settings → Content guidelines.
2. Choose a voice preset from the dropdown.
3. Type your focus and exclusion instructions into the text field.
4. Save. These defaults apply to every new generation for this project — manual runs, scheduled occurrences, and any agent-triggered generation.

Override for a single run

You can change either guideline for one run without touching the project defaults:

• Dashboard: On any draft, click Regenerate… to open a dialog prefilled with the current effective guidelines. Adjust the voice or instructions and run. The override is remembered on that draft for future regenerations.
• Schedules: Each schedule has its own voice and focus & exclusions settings, set in the schedule dialog. Every occurrence of that schedule uses them instead of the project defaults.
• API: Pass a guidelines object to any generation endpoint. For example:

{ "guidelines": { "audience": "business", "instructions": "No docs-site changes." } }

Each field falls back to the project default independently — you only need to include the field you want to change.

Tips and limits

• The audience value must be exactly technical, business, or mixed — any other value returns a validation error.
• Instructions are capped at 2,000 characters. If you have a lot of rules, prioritize the ones that matter most.
• Guidelines never change the output format. Changelogs still come back as structured JSON, blog posts as Markdown, and so on — only the writing style and scope are affected.
• There is currently no way to suppress a project default for a single run without replacing it with different text.