lingtai-ai Saved presets
Evidence: tui/internal/preset/preset.go:213-610,731-891.
Templates vs saved — the directory is the marker
~/.lingtai-tui/presets/templates/ holds the 12 TUI-owned built-ins;
~/.lingtai-tui/presets/saved/ holds user-owned clones. There is no in-band
"is_template" field — Source (SourceTemplate / SourceSaved) is set
purely from which directory a file was loaded from, and is never
serialized. Two presets with byte-identical JSON but different directories
are treated differently.
Load order — saved wins
Load(name) (preset.go:270-293) looks in saved/ first, then
templates/. A saved preset with the same name as a template wins — the
user's variant overrides. List() (preset.go:217-240) returns saved
presets first (alphabetical), then the templates. Treat the templates'
exact relative order as an implementation detail; current source does not
reliably guarantee the full BuiltinPresets() sequence.
A saved preset falls back to the template only when the saved file is
genuinely absent; a malformed saved override blocks fallback. Load
distinguishes "file doesn't exist" (errors.Is(err, fs.ErrNotExist), falls
through to the next directory) from a real failure — invalid JSON,
permission error, or a path that is a directory — which is surfaced to the
caller with the underlying cause preserved rather than collapsed into a
generic not-found. Only when both the saved and template files are
absent does Load return the not-found error.
Structural Validate() is not auto-invoked by Save or Load
Validate() (preset.go:358-410) mirrors the kernel's own load-time
validation gauntlet (description.summary non-empty; a non-empty tier
must be one of 1..5, while an empty tier is allowed;
llm.provider/llm.model non-empty; context_limit shape). It exists so
callers — notably the preset editor's commit path — can refuse to save
something the kernel would refuse to load. Neither Save nor Load calls
it automatically; a caller that writes a preset without checking
Validate() first can write a structurally invalid file. The editor calls
it explicitly (see reference/operations/availability-save-gate/SKILL.md).
Save — always to saved/, same-name overwrites, no atomicity claim
Save(p) (preset.go:415-429) writes indented JSON only to the
saved/ directory — never to templates/; that directory is owned
exclusively by RefreshTemplates/Bootstrap. A save under a name that
already exists in saved/ overwrites it (os.WriteFile, not
create-exclusive). There is no atomicity claim for this write — it is a
direct, non-atomic os.WriteFile, not a temp-file-plus-rename.
<template>-N naming for edited templates
AutoSavedName(template, existing) (preset.go:864-892) picks
<template>-<N> for the lowest unused positive N, so editing and saving a
built-in template never overwrites the template itself — it always
branches off a fresh saved copy the user owns.
Delete — saved-only, missing is success, but requires exact authority
Delete(name) (preset.go:457-464) removes a file from saved/ only —
templates are immutable from the user's perspective, and Bootstrap
re-extracts them on the next launch regardless. Deleting a name that
doesn't exist in saved/ returns nil (success), not an error. This
success-on-missing behavior does not lower the bar for when a delete is
proposed: deleting a user's saved preset is still a destructive action that
requires exact authority for that specific preset before it is attempted.
Bootstrap / RefreshTemplates — rewrites and prunes templates only
RefreshTemplates() (preset.go:482-510) rewrites every file in
templates/ from BuiltinPresets() on every TUI launch, and prunes any
templates/*.json file no longer present in BuiltinPresets() — so a TUI
upgrade that retires a template propagates cleanly. It never touches
saved/. Like Save, there is no atomicity claim for these per-file
writes.
Operations
For why the preset editor's Save is structural-only and never makes a
live provider/model call, see
reference/operations/availability-save-gate/SKILL.md.
For how a saved preset becomes the running default and what /refresh
switches, see reference/operations/activation-session-refresh/SKILL.md.