Your Own AI Instructions
Why your own instructions?
Distill ships with rules that fit most documents: the description stays short, the category does not appear in it, the sender is reduced to a short name. Sometimes you want something different — then put a few sentences in your own words under Settings → AI → Your own AI instructions.
The instructions apply globally, to every provider and to every file you rename. They are limited to 1,000 characters; the counter below the field shows what is left.
Examples
- “Include the invoice number in the description.” — overrides the default rule that specifically prevents this
- “Always write the sender in capital letters.”
- “For bank statements the description should contain the month.”
- “Use the category vertrag for contracts, even for amendments.”
- “Write descriptions in English.”
Feel free to write full sentences. Keywords work too, but a clear sentence gets you the result you want more reliably.
An instruction that reverses one of the built-in rules — taking the invoice number into the description after all, say — does not always land on the first try. Be more specific in that case: “Start the description with the invoice number” works more reliably than “Include the invoice number”.
What instructions can and cannot do
Your instructions may shape the text content: how the description is phrased, how the sender is written, which category the AI picks, which language it writes in. They can also override the built-in style rules.
What cannot be changed is the shape of the answer. Which fields exist — date, category, description, sender, amount, invoice number — is fixed, and no instruction lifts that. This is deliberate: Distill assembles the filename from those fields afterwards, locally on your Mac.
Your rules and templates are equally untouched. Date format, separator, casing, prefix, maximum length and regex rules are applied afterwards, regardless of what the AI returned. If you do not want a field in the filename at all, the template is the right place for that — not the instruction.
Effect and billing
A changed instruction takes effect from the next rename onwards. The same file with a different instruction is a new job for Distill and is analyzed again — with Distill Cloud that costs another credit. The same file with an unchangedinstruction does not.
If you clear the instructions again, Distill behaves exactly as before — the built-in rule set applies unchanged.