The Life Prompt: Teaching AI Who You Actually Are

I was three weeks into building Clarineffable when I noticed the pattern.

Every conversation with Claude started with me re-explaining who I was. What I was building. How I like to work. What I already know. What I don't.

Over. And over. And over.

The Groundhog Day Problem

It's not the AI's fault. Every conversation is a blank slate. That's a feature — but it's also friction. You lose momentum explaining context the AI could have known.

Worse: the AI gives you generic responses when it doesn't know you. Safe, cautious, one-size-fits-all advice. It hedges because it doesn't know if you're a beginner or an expert, whether you want details or just the answer.

What If AI Had a User Manual for You?

The idea came from work. In my fintech career, I'd written professional operating manuals — documents that explained how I think, what I value, how I like to receive information. They're common at the executive level for working across organizations.

What if I wrote one for AI?

Not a resume. Not a bio. A comprehensive document that teaches any AI assistant how I operate. My values. My technical environment. My communication preferences. The things that frustrate me and the things that delight me.

I called it a Life Prompt.

What Goes Into a Life Prompt

My life prompt runs about 3,000 words. It covers:

There's even a section on voice transcription errors — because I talk to AI more than I type, and "Clarineffable" gets transcribed in creative ways.

What Changed

The difference was immediate.

Claude stopped explaining things I already know. Started making decisions instead of asking permission for obvious next steps. Understood my family context when I mentioned building something for a neurodivergent family member. Remembered that I prefer code delivered one step at a time.

I wasn't just getting responses anymore. I was getting responses calibrated to how I work. That's a subtle difference that compounds over hours of collaboration.

Building Your Own

Writing a life prompt from scratch is daunting. What do you include? How much is too much? What actually matters?

So I built an interactive tool that asks you the right questions. You paste a prompt into any LLM, answer questions one at a time, and it generates a complete, structured life prompt at the end.

It takes about 20-30 minutes. You get a document you can use with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — any AI that accepts text input.

Why This Matters Now

AI is becoming the new interface for everything. How you work with it matters more than which model you use. The people who learn to collaborate effectively with AI will have an advantage — not because they're smarter, but because they've reduced friction.

A life prompt is one piece of that. It's the difference between a new employee who has to learn everything about you, and one who's been briefed by a colleague who knows you well.

The AI doesn't actually remember you. But it can act like it does — if you give it the right context.