Prompts

Aether assembles system prompts from multiple sources — markdown files on disk, glob patterns in your config, and MCP server instructions — into a single system prompt for each agent.

Prompt sources

Prompts are assembled in this order:

1. Inherited prompts — prompts array at the top level of settings.json, applied to all agents
2. Agent-specific prompts — prompts array on individual agent entries
3. MCP instructions — Prompts provided by MCP servers during initialization

Prompt files

The prompts field in settings.json accepts glob patterns that resolve to markdown files relative to the project root. Top-level patterns are inherited by all agents; agent-specific patterns add to (not replace) the inherited set.

.aether/settings.json

{
  "prompts": ["AGENTS.md", "prompts/*.md"],
  "agents": [
    {
      "name": "coder",
      "prompts": [".aether/agents/coder/AGENTS.md"],
      "..."
    }
  ]
}

A common convention is to place an AGENTS.md at the project root with shared instructions:

AGENTS.md

# Project Agent

You are a coding assistant for this Rust project.

## Rules
- Always read files before editing them
- Write tests for new functionality
- Use `cargo clippy` to check for warnings

Note

Every glob pattern must match at least one file. Aether reports a validation error if a pattern matches nothing.

Debugging prompts

Use show-prompt to see the fully assembled system prompt for any agent:

aether show-prompt
aether show-prompt --agent researcher
aether show-prompt -C /path/to/project