Your agent starts every single run knowing nothing whatsoever. It has no idea who you are, who you work with, what you sell, or that the two of you had this exact conversation yesterday. Whatever it knows, it knows because you wrote it down somewhere it can read.
Skip this lesson and you will still get an agent working in lesson 6. It will produce competent, generic work for a competent, generic practice, and you will rewrite every line of it before you can use any of it, until the morning you stop opening it.
An assistant who has never met you produces work for somebody else's business. That has nothing to do with AI. It is equally true of a human assistant on their first morning, and the fix is the same one it has always been, which is to brief them properly, once.
The difference is that this assistant is on its first morning every single time it runs. Nothing carries over, so every run starts from zero.
Which leaves you two options. Write your practice down once, in one place, or explain it again inside every agent you ever build. The second one holds up fine until there are four agents, each carrying a slightly different version of your business, and you raise your prices and have to go find all four.
The file is already in your folder with five headings and an example under each one. Your job is to fill in what you know today.
| Section | What it is for | Why an agent needs it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Me and my practice | Who you are, what you do, how long you have done it, what you run it on | So it stops suggesting things that have nothing to do with how you work |
| 2. Who I serve | The people you work with, and what they walk in carrying | The highest-value section in the file. Everything written for a client runs off this one |
| 3. What I offer right now | Every offer, what it costs, who each one is for | So it never invents an offer, or quotes somebody the wrong price |
| 4. What I am working on | The one or two things genuinely in motion this season | Stops it suggesting the thing you finished in March |
| 5. How I want you to work with me | Tone, pace, what to ask before doing anything | Matters most when you are talking to an AI directly. Your agents mostly run on 1 through 4 |
Section 2 is where the time goes, and it is the one worth being uncomfortably specific in. "Women in midlife" describes about forty million people and hands an agent nothing to work with. "People in perimenopause who have been told their labs are normal and still feel awful, most of whom found me after a year of trying to sort it out on their own" gives it somebody to write to.
Ordinary language beats professional language here, every time. Write it the way you would say it to a colleague over coffee, and leave the asides in. The parts where you sound most like yourself are the parts that make your agent's output sound like you, and a polished paragraph of positioning copy gives an agent almost nothing to work with. (If you catch yourself typing "empowering people to reclaim their vitality," put the keyboard down and say the sentence out loud instead.)
Half-filled beats blank, and it always will. Two good sections and three empty ones is already better than nothing, and the file gets sharper every time you touch it.
Write what is true today rather than what you are hoping for. The group program you have been circling since February goes in section 4, as something you are building. Put it in section 3 as an offer and your agent will start pointing clients at something that does not exist yet.
Come back to it. Prices change, offers get retired, the season moves. This is the file you edit when that happens, and editing in one place is the entire reason it exists.
This file gets pasted into an AI's instructions, and later it gets stored inside your agents. Assume it leaves your laptop, because it does.
None of that is a reason to be cagey about your own business. Your practice details are exactly what makes this file work. Other people's information is what stays out.
Five empty sections is the slow way to do this, and a blank page is where people put something off for a week.
The alternative is to open a chat with Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to interview you about your practice, one question at a time, then write the file up at the end. Reacting to a question is faster than inventing an answer out of nothing, and a blank page invites you to close the tab.
Open the interview prompt and it does exactly that. It follows the same rules as the one in lesson 6, which are worth stating out loud, because they are what make it useful instead of exhausting.
And it must never invent a detail about your practice. If it does not know, it asks you or it leaves the line blank. A confidently invented price is worse than an empty section, because an empty section is obvious and an invented one reads as fact until a client repeats it back to you.
Lesson 6 is where it gets used for the first time. Every agent's job description has a section reading what it needs to know about my practice, and the answer is a slice of this file.
A slice, deliberately, rather than the whole thing. Your follow-up agent needs to know who you serve and what you offer. It has no use for your pricing philosophy or what you are building this season. Every agent gets the part of this file its own job touches, which keeps its output narrow and keeps each run cheap.
The file works with both. How you hand it over is where they part company, so find yourself below and ignore the other one.
If you use Claude. Open the whole command center folder with Claude and you are finished. CLAUDE.md is the filename it looks for on its own, so it reads your practice with no setup, every conversation, without you pasting anything. That is the entire reason the file is named what it is.
If you use ChatGPT. There is no folder to open and no filename it watches for, so you hand it over yourself. Two ways, and the second one is worth the extra two minutes.
If you use both, or neither. Keep the file exactly as it is. Nothing in this course depends on which chat you prefer, because your agents read this file directly and could not care less where else it has been. The name on it is a convenience for Claude users and it costs everyone else nothing.
| The snag | What is going on | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| "I do not know what to put for who I serve" | Usually you serve more than one group and are trying to write one sentence that covers all of them | Write the group you most want more of. One is enough |
| "My offers are in the middle of changing" | Common, and no reason to stall | Write what is true today, and note in section 4 that it is moving |
| "It feels weird writing about myself" | Also common | Write it addressed to an assistant on their first morning, since that is exactly who it is for |
| It came out sounding like a sales page | You wrote it as marketing copy | Say it out loud once, then write down what you said |
| Every section feels too long | Nothing is wrong | A paragraph per section is plenty. It is a briefing, and briefings are short |
If yours does not look like any of that, drop it in the chat and I will answer you there.