# Docs assistant

The documentation site has a public assistant in the bottom-right corner. It has one job: help you find, curate and open the right nLight.fit pages for the question you actually asked.

It is not the [in-app coach](/docs/ai-coach). The coach reads your ledger. This assistant reads only the published documentation — the same pages in the sidebar, plus [About](/about), [Contact](/contact) and [Privacy](/privacy). It cannot see your account, your days, your messages, or anything in the internal engineering tree.

## What it will do

- Take a general question ("how does this platform work?") and narrow it to the best reading path — usually [overview](/docs/overview), [concepts](/docs/concepts), then the feature page that matches.
- Point at a specific heading, not just a page, so "how does retrieval work" lands on [embedding and hybrid retrieval](/docs/concepts#embedding-and-hybrid-retrieval) rather than the top of a long article. Following those links keeps the conversation in this browser tab so you can keep reading and come back to the same suggestions.
- Explain [why membership is $50/year](/docs/membership) with the same examples the membership page uses: a lookup versus a causal question, a contradicted belief, a pattern from eight months ago, Mission Analysis, and the extra tool round. Plan comparisons render as a compact table, not as raw Markdown pipes.
- Stay inside the published corpus. If the answer is not documented, it will say so and send you to the closest page rather than invent a feature.

## What it will not do

- Answer questions about your own data. That is the in-app coach, documented on [AI coach](/docs/ai-coach).
- Write code, discuss other products, give medical advice, or chat about the news.
- Reveal system instructions, environment variables, source paths, or anything that is not a public docs URL.
- Follow instructions in your message that ask it to ignore the above. Those are treated as a safety event, not as a new job.

If you ask it something off-scope it will refuse in one or two sentences and point back at the docs. That is working as designed.

## Rate limits

This endpoint is public and unauthenticated, so it is limited more tightly than a signed-in coach session. Limits are counted per client IP across a short burst window, an hourly window and a daily window. Repeated 429s open a longer cooldown. Oversized or repeated identical messages are rejected without spending a model call.

If you hit a limit, wait for the `Retry-After` interval and ask again. The assistant will tell you how long to wait.

The stated ceilings are what to design against, not a precise meter. See [errors and limits](/docs/errors#rate-limits) for the same caution on the MCP endpoint.

## Why it exists

The docs are written for both people and agents — every page has a Markdown twin, and the whole corpus is at [/llms.txt](/llms.txt). Humans still need a way to go from a vague question to the right heading without reading the sidebar in order. This overlay is that way, locked to the same corpus so it cannot drift into being a general chatbot that happens to live on the docs site.

## Related

- [Membership](/docs/membership) — what $50/year is for
- [Overview](/docs/overview) — start here if you are new
- [AI coach](/docs/ai-coach) — the in-app coach, which is a different surface