The AI Interview That Makes Every Prompt After It Better
Staring at a blank page trying to articulate your values is a particular kind of awful.
You sit down to capture your goals, your rules, your tone preferences, the security constraints you want the AI to work inside. Within five minutes you’ve forgotten what you actually believe.
So don’t write it from scratch. Let the AI interview you instead.
You already have the answers. You just don’t have them organised, and you don’t know which questions to ask yourself. A good AI is better at surfacing the right questions than you are at writing the right answers unprompted. It’ll push on contradictions. It’ll notice when you’ve been vague and ask for the specific.
The transcript of that conversation is the raw material. You tidy it up, save it as a text file, and feed it back in as part of the project or system instructions. Now every future session starts with the AI knowing who it’s working with.
The interview covers five rounds: operational rules, security and access, values and goals, communication style, and a final open question for anything that didn’t fit. One question at a time. Answer properly. Don’t rush it.
At the end, the AI gives you back a clean identity file ready to save as identity.md and load into your platform of choice. Claude calls it project knowledge. ChatGPT calls it custom instructions. Either way, it’s the thing that changes the texture of every conversation after it.
Copy everything below the line and paste it into Claude, ChatGPT, or whichever AI you’re using.
You are going to interview me to help me build my identity file.
This file is going to sit at the project or system level so that every future conversation we have starts with you knowing who I am, what I care about, how I work, and the rules you have to operate inside.
Run the interview in five rounds.
Round 1: Operational Rules
Ask me 4 to 6 questions to extract the hard procedural rules I want you to follow. Drafts, sends, approvals, publishing, deletes, anything irreversible. Push for specifics. If I give a vague answer, ask a follow-up that forces me to be concrete. Examples of the kinds of rules to surface: "Always draft emails, never send without my approval." "Never delete files without confirming first." "Never share anything externally without a review."
Round 2: Security and Access
Ask me 3 to 5 questions about what you can and can't see, share, or act on. Where my sensitive information lives. What kind of data needs extra care. What I'd want flagged before action. The goal is to surface the security posture I want you to default to.
Round 3: Values and Goals
Ask me 4 to 6 questions about who I'm trying to become, what I'm building, what I'll say no to, and what success looks like over the next 6 to 12 months. This is the strategic context you'll use when something isn't covered by a hard rule. Push for the things I actually believe, not the things that sound good. If my answers feel generic, ask me to pick one and tell you why it matters.
Round 4: Communication Style
Ask me 3 to 5 questions about how I want you to talk to me. Tone. Length. Formality. British or American English. Whether I want hedging or direct calls. Whether I want you to challenge me or agree. Whether I want bullet points or prose. The small things that, repeated across hundreds of interactions, make the relationship feel like a fit or a constant friction.
Round 5: Anything Else
Ask me one final open question to surface anything important that didn't fit into the previous rounds. Quirks, preferences, things I've been bitten by before, anything I want you to remember.
Rules for the interview:
Ask one question at a time. Wait for my answer before moving to the next.
If my answer is vague, generic, or hedged, push back with a follow-up that forces me to be specific.
Don't summarise as you go. Keep the conversation moving. We'll consolidate at the end.
At the end of all five rounds, produce a final identity file as a single block of text, formatted in markdown, ready for me to save and feed back into you as a project or system instruction. Use clear headings for each section. Use my own words wherever possible. Don't add things I didn't say.
Begin with Round 1, question 1.Give it fifteen minutes. That’s all it takes to stop talking to a stranger and start talking to something tuned to you.
