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Find a template (and the rules it carries)

When to use: Before filling or rebranding a template (fill-template.md, rebrand-template.md), or whenever the user says “template”, “theme”, or “use one of our decks as a starting point” and you don’t already have a canvas_id in hand.

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Templates vs themes

If a user says “template” loosely and means a deck or a post, they mean template — theme is the narrower, slides-only, brand-kit-attached concept. Don’t reach for it unless the user is specifically talking about layouts a brand kit applies automatically.

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Finding one

Two lanes, same filters — pick by who the results are for:
  • Drop query from list_my_canvases and template_type alone browses the team’s curated templates/themes by recency — useful when the user just wants to see what’s available, with no search term yet.
  • An empty result means the team curated none. Say so — don’t presciently offer an ordinary canvas as if it were a template.
  • Any readable canvas works as start_design_task’s template_canvas_id — the template_type filter only narrows discovery down to the ones the team deliberately curated for this purpose.

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The built-in instructions — aware, don’t restate

The design agent already receives a template’s author-written instructions automatically once you pass it as template_canvas_id — they travel onto the remix copy and are hydrated into the agent’s turn prompt server-side. This gives three rules for the prompt you write:
  1. Never copy a template’s instructions into prompt. They travel automatically. A paraphrase (“never modify the title slide” → “keep it roughly as-is”) creates a weaker, drifting duplicate in the more heavily-weighted user turn.
  2. Never write a prompt that asks for something the template forbids. Read the row’s guidance (below) before drafting.
  3. On a genuine conflict, ask the user — don’t pick a side. Locked nodes/pages are a hard constraint; everything else is author-intent vs user-request with no defined winner at runtime. Do not invent or publish a precedence rule the runtime doesn’t implement.
Worked example — the user asks for something the template’s guidance forbids:
This template says “Never modify the title slide,” but you asked for a new hero there. Want me to leave it alone, or start from a different template?
The one exception: if the user explicitly overrides after being asked, state the override plainly in the prompt (e.g. “the user asked to replace the title slide despite the template’s note — do it”). That’s the only case the prompt should mention a template rule at all.

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Reading guidance on a search/list row

A canvas with author-pinned instructions carries a guidance object:
pinned_note_count > 0 means there’s additional per-element guidance (pinned notes on specific nodes/pages) you can’t see from this row — you don’t need to fetch it yourself, the agent will read and follow it once it runs against the copy. Just know it’s there: don’t assume a template with pinned_note_count: 0 is unconstrained if agent_instructions is also present, and don’t assume a template is safe to freely rewrite just because guidance is absent from the row (a canvas with no authored instructions has no guidance key at all — that’s the “no constraints” case, not an omission).

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See also