How Playbooks Work

Intent

A Playbook captures how a process should run. It's a structured guide that any agent — or any human — can follow. This article teaches the six-section playbook structure, the execution model, and how expertise gets encoded as governable substrate the crew can invoke repeatedly. Read this when authoring a new Playbook or before invoking one for a multi-step process.

What a Playbook Is

Think of a Playbook as a process document with teeth. Not a vague checklist, but a structured guide with clear intent, hard rules, and defined outcomes. The same Playbook that an employee follows during client onboarding can be followed by an AI agent doing the same task.

The Six Sections

Every Playbook has six required sections:

1. Intent — What this process accomplishes and why. The North Star. When uncertain, return here.

2. Suggestions — Soft guidance. Best practices. Follow them unless you have a good reason not to. These are the domain expert's accumulated wisdom.

3. Rules — Hard constraints. Non-negotiable. An agent can be creative within the rules but cannot break them. Rules are testable — an observer can verify whether they were followed.

4. Resources — What you need before starting. Documents, templates, reference materials. For agents, these get loaded into context.

5. Outcomes — What "done" looks like. Required outcomes must be met. Optional outcomes are nice-to-have. These are results, not steps.

6. Verification — How you prove it was done correctly. Not "was the output perfect?" but "did the process stay within the constraints and produce the defined outcomes?"

Why This Matters

The Playbook format separates what you know from what the AI does. A domain expert captures their methodology once — their intent, their rules, their definition of quality. Then any agent can execute it, on any platform, at any time. Your expertise becomes scalable.

Creating Playbooks

You can create Playbooks two ways:

1. Ask the concierge. Say "I want to capture my client onboarding process as a Playbook." The concierge will ask you questions and structure your answers into the six sections.

2. Write one yourself. Create a file in playbooks/ with the .playbook.md extension and fill in the sections. For a reference, use any of the concierge-paths outcome playbooks at .tropo/playbooks/concierge-paths/ (e.g., tour-tropo.playbook.md, create-an-agent.playbook.md) — they conform to playbook.capsule v2.0. The legacy first-vault-setup.playbook.md is superseded (v1.3, 2026-04-21) and should not be used as a reference template.

Your First Playbook

You've already experienced a Playbook — the First Vault Setup that ran when you set up your vault. That's the pattern. Every Playbook works the same way: clear goal, structured guidance, defined outcomes. The system demonstrates itself.