Slash Commands: Steering One Reply at a Time

There's a specific kind of frustration in AI roleplay that every regular runs into. You write one careful line — "I step into the room and wait." — and the character replies with a paragraph that puts words in your mouth, decides how you feel, and jumps the scene forward three days. You didn't want any of that. You wanted the character to react, and you wanted to keep your own half of the story.

The usual fixes are too big. You can rewrite your message and regenerate. You can dig into settings and change narration style or response length for the whole conversation. You can edit the character's profile. All of these work, and all of them are overkill for a problem that is, really, about this one reply.

So we built slash commands: small, temporary directives you drop into the chat box that shape the next reply only.

The thermostat problem

Most "control" features in chat apps are thermostats. You set them, they stay set, everything downstream obeys until you go back and change them again. That's the right model for genuine preferences — if you always want third-person prose, you should set that once and forget it.

But a huge amount of steering isn't a preference. It's a correction. This reply ran long. This turn spoke for me. This scene needs to slow down and breathe. The moment you make those corrections persistent, you create a second problem: you have to remember to undo them. People don't. They flip "short replies" on to fix one bloated turn and then wonder for the next hour why the character has gone terse.

We wanted a steering wheel, not a thermostat. You turn it, the car responds, and it springs back to centre on its own. The reply after the one you steered behaves exactly as it did before, because nothing was actually changed — your saved settings are untouched the whole time.

What's on the wheel

Six commands, in two families.

The "stay out of my lane" family — the fix for an AI that keeps puppeting your character:

• Don't speak for me — no dialogue written or implied on your behalf
• Don't act for me — no deciding your actions, thoughts, feelings, or consent
• Only character POV — the reply stays on the character's side and leaves yours open

The dials family — things you'd otherwise have to open settings to touch:

• Response length — short, medium, or long, for this turn
• Narration style — force first or third person for this turn
• Pacing — slow down and stay in the moment, or push to the next beat

You can stack up to three on a single message. The combination people reach for most is Don't speak for me + Don't act for me + Response length: Long — a longer, character-only reply that leaves every word and move of your own to you.

Design decisions that mattered

Type, don't hunt. Press / and a menu appears, but you never have to use it. Type /don't speak for me or /pacing: fast in plain language and it's recognized automatically — in English or Chinese. The fast path stays in the keyboard, where roleplayers already live.

The command is never your message. A directive becomes a small chip above the input; the character sees your actual words plus a private, one-turn instruction it's told never to mention. The steering stays invisible in the reply. No [OOC: please be shorter] leaking into the prose.

Stacking has guardrails. Three is the cap, duplicates collapse to their latest value, and order doesn't matter. You can't accidentally build a contradictory pile of instructions.

It springs back. This is the whole point. Length and narration commands temporarily override your saved preferences for one turn and then yield straight back to them. There is no state to clean up, because there's no state.

The philosophy underneath

This is the same idea that runs through everything we build: a feature should be as big as the problem and no bigger. Smart suggestions step back the longer a conversation goes. Forking appears only when branching makes sense. And steering, it turns out, is usually a per-turn act — so the control that fixes it should be per-turn too, and it should clean up after itself.

The best version of a control feature is one you don't have to remember you used. You turn the wheel, the scene goes where you wanted, and you get back to the story.

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Try it on your next chat — type / and steer a reply. Tell us which combination you reach for on our Discord community.