The Head Start
Teach AI who you are — once — so every chat starts smarter
The biggest time-saver in this whole course
Right now, every time you open a new AI chat, it has no idea who you are. You end up repeating yourself — “I work in marketing,” “keep it short,” “don’t be so formal.” What if AI already knew all that? That’s what we’re setting up today. Five minutes now, better results from every conversation going forward.
What we’re building
Most AI tools have a place where you can write a short “about me” that the AI reads before every conversation. ChatGPT calls it Custom Instructions, Claude calls it your Profile, and other tools have similar features.
We’ve built a prompt that turns your AI into a custom-instructions coach. Copy it, paste it into any AI chat, and it will interview you one question at a time. When you’re done, it’ll produce a polished set of instructions you can paste into your settings. It’s faster than filling out a form, and the AI will produce better writing than a template ever could.
Help me create custom instructions for my AI assistant profile. Interview me one question at a time about: 1. Who I am — my role, industry, and what a typical day looks like 2. How I'll use AI — the kinds of tasks I need help with 3. My communication preferences — tone, length, format 4. Any rules or pet peeves — things you should always or never do After I've answered, compile everything into a polished set of custom instructions I can paste directly into my AI settings. Make it concise and natural-sounding.
Where to put it
Once your AI has generated your custom instructions, copy them and paste them into your AI tool of choice. It takes about 30 seconds. Pick the tool you use most and start there — you can always add the others later.
Click your profile icon (bottom-left), then Settings.
Go to Personalization → Custom Instructions.
Paste what you copied into the “What would you like ChatGPT to know about you?” box and hit Save.
Click your name (bottom-left) to open Settings.
Go to Profile.
Paste it in and save. Claude will use this in every new conversation.
Tap the Settings gear icon.
Look for Extensions or Personalization (the name varies by version).
Paste your instructions there and save.
Try it out
Now for the fun part. Open a new chat in whichever tool you just set up and paste this prompt:
Draft a quick status update for my team about this week's progress.
Notice how it already writes in your style, for your audience, at the length you prefer — without you saying a word about any of that. That’s the whole point. No more “actually, can you make it more concise?” back-and-forth.
Takeaway: You just gave AI a cheat sheet about you. Every new conversation now starts a step ahead. As your work or preferences change, come back and update it — think of it as a living document, not a one-time thing.
What you just set up goes by different names depending on who you’re talking to. ChatGPT calls it “custom instructions,” Claude calls it your “profile,” and developers often call the broader concept a “system prompt.”
Here’s the small but useful distinction: a system prompt is the full set of behind-the-scenes instructions that shape how AI behaves — including safety rules and platform defaults that you never see. Your custom instructions are the part of that system prompt that’s about you. You’re personalizing a piece of something larger.
You don’t need to remember any of this to use AI well. But if you ever hear someone say “system prompt” in a meeting or article, now you know what they mean — and that you’re already using the same idea.
Need help bringing this to your team?
We work alongside your team to build AI-native workflows — from one-week sprints to full engineering acceleration. No handoffs, no slide decks.
Talk to us