3 articles
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Give your AI a few custom shortcuts
Two colons and a short word, and your AI knows what you mean. This is how I put custom commands in my custom instructions, for what I ask every week.
In a workshop this week I showed my custom instructions on the screen. They state that I do not want to see emoji. And not too many bullet points, and normal capital letters. And below that is a list of lines that start with two colons. Those are the rules I use most often, and they are barely a word long.
Feel free to copy the prompt at the bottom of this article, then you can write your first shortcut together with your AI.
What you type again every week
Have a look at your own chat history. Chances are you formulate the same questions over and over again. Translate this to Dutch. Write a short bio about me. Make this text a bit looser. Every time you type a sentence, sometimes two. And every time it is slightly different, so the result is too.
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Memory or instruction? Facts and behaviour belong apart
Why your AI keeps forgetting your house style, and how you put facts, behavioural rules and project knowledge each in their own place so it works consistently every time.
'Why does it always forget my tone of voice?' I get that question in almost every workshop. Usually it turns out that everything is mixed together in one large instruction field: who you are, who you work for, how you write, which clients you have, and what formatting you want. One long piece of text that is sent along with every conversation and that the model can only half follow.
At the bottom of this article you will find a prompt that splits your instructions for you, which you can just copy.
Two types of information
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Tell your agent what not to do as well
An agent does what it can, unless you provide a framework. Why boundaries in your instructions are just as important as the task itself.
I often tell the story in workshops of someone who gave an AI agent access to a credit card, with a clear instruction: book the cheapest flight to Bali. The agent got to work, found no regular seats left, and booked a business class ticket with an expensive airline. Technically the cheapest available option. A few thousand euros later, the owner understood what had gone wrong.
Feel free to copy the prompt at the bottom of this article, so you can immediately write the boundaries for your own agent.
The agent did exactly what was asked
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