Agent Guidelines (CLI)

Agent guidelines are managed differently in Tabnine CLI than they are for the Tabnine IDE plugin.

Agent guidelines (a.k.a. "coaching guidelines") are managed differently in Tabnine CLI than they are for the Tabnine IDE plugin. Guidelines in Tabnine CLI are applied through Tabnine-provided context and tools.

Go to the following hyperlink to manage Agent Guidelines in the Tabnine IDE plugin.

Guidelines help Tabnine CLI align its responses with your organization's engineering standards. When guidelines are available for your authenticated account or organization, Tabnine CLI can use them while planning, writing code, reviewing code, and answering questions about coding standards.

How Agent Guidelines Work in Tabnine CLI

Tabnine CLI supports two guideline flows.

First, organization instructions and service-account instructions are added to the agent's operating context. These instructions are configured outside the CLI by your Tabnine administrator. When Tabnine CLI starts, it fetches the available instructions for your authenticated account and applies them to the session. Service-account instructions only apply when they are configured for the authenticated service account.

Second, coding guidelines are available through the built-in Tabnine Coaching Guidelines tool. When the tool is enabled, the agent can fetch language-specific rules before it writes code, reviews code, or answers questions about your team's standards.

These flows are separate. Organization and service-account instructions are fetched automatically from your Tabnine account context. The Coaching Guidelines setting controls only the built-in Coaching Guidelines MCP server.

Requirements

You need to be signed in to Tabnine CLI with an account that has access to your organization's Tabnine environment. Your Tabnine server must also support Coaching Guidelines for CLI use if you want the agent to fetch language-specific coding rules during a session.

The built-in Coaching Guidelines tool is enabled by default. If it has been disabled, you can enable it from the /settings dialog.

Enable or Disable Coaching Guidelines

In an interactive Tabnine CLI session, open settings:

/settings

Find Enable Tabnine Coaching Guidelines under the listed tools. This setting controls whether Tabnine CLI loads the built-in Coaching Guidelines MCP server.

This setting doesn't control whether organization or service-account instructions are fetched and added to the session context.

The setting is stored as:

{
  "tools": {
    "enableCoaching": true
  }
}

Changing this setting requires restarting Tabnine CLI.

Availability and Fallback Behavior

If Tabnine CLI cannot fetch organization or service-account instructions, the session continues without them. If Coaching Guidelines are not supported by your Tabnine server, the built-in Coaching Guidelines tool is not loaded.

If you ask for guideline-based review and no guidelines are available, Tabnine CLI should tell you that it cannot access configured guidelines instead of inventing rules.

Troubleshooting

If language-specific coding guidelines do not appear to be applied, check that Enable Tabnine Coaching Guidelines is turned on in /settings, and that you restarted the CLI after changing the setting.

You can also ask Tabnine CLI whether the Coaching Guidelines tool appears to be available in the current session. This is a practical check, not a standalone status command.

Example: Check availability

Can you check whether Tabnine Coaching Guidelines appear to be available in this session?