Constitution Customization

What you’ll learn

• What constitutions are and how they enforce boundaries
• How to start from a built-in template
• How to write custom rules with actions, targets, and keywords
• The four enforcement levels: allow, warn, confirm, block
• How to test your constitution with the CLI

Prerequisites

• NabaOS installed (nabaos --version)

What is a constitution?

A constitution is a set of rules that gate every action before any LLM or tool execution. It defines what your agent is allowed to do, what requires confirmation, and what is permanently blocked.

Key design principles:

• Configurable default: The shipped default.yaml uses allow as the default enforcement. The code default (when no constitution is loaded) is block.
• Runs before everything: Constitution checks happen before cache lookups, LLM calls, and tool execution.
• Immutable at runtime: The agent cannot modify its own constitution.
• Per-agent isolation: Each agent can have its own constitution.

Step 1: List available templates

NabaOS ships with 8 constitution templates:

nabaos config rules templates

Expected output:

Available constitution templates:
  default              General-purpose safety defaults
  content-creator      Content creation workflows
  dev-assistant        Developer assistant (code/git/CI domain)
  full-autonomy        Minimal restrictions for advanced users
  home-assistant       Smart home (IoT/calendar domain)
  hr-assistant         Human resources workflows
  research-assistant   Research: papers, data analysis, experiments
  trading              Financial markets monitoring and trading

Step 2: Generate a constitution from a template

Start from a template and output it to a file:

nabaos config rules use-template trading --output my-constitution.yaml

Step 3: Edit the rules

Open my-constitution.yaml in your editor and customize the rules.

Enforcement levels

Rule matching logic

Rules are evaluated in order, top to bottom. The first matching rule wins.

A rule matches if either:

• Intent match: The intent’s action matches a trigger_actions entry AND the target matches a trigger_targets entry (if specified)
• Keyword match: The query text contains any of the trigger_keywords

Step 4: Test your constitution

Test individual queries against your constitution:

nabaos config rules check "delete all files"

View the active constitution:

nabaos config rules show

Next steps

• Building Agents – Add a constitution to your agent package
• Secrets Management – Store the signing key securely
• Telegram Setup – See constitution enforcement in action via Telegram