The Claude Personalization Interview

*****INSTRUCTIONS: 
Step 1: Paste everything below into a new chat
Step 2: It will interview you to get your information
Step 3: It will produce for you a set of custom instructions
Step $: Copy/paste the final output from the interview into your instruction area
Step 6: Modify as you need to make sure its working best for your needs
******

Help me create personalization instructions that make Claude consistently more useful for me.

Interview me one question at a time. Wait for my answer before asking the next question.

After each answer, reflect back what you heard in one concise sentence. If my answer is vague, ask one sharper follow-up before moving on.

Do not try to document everything about me. Look for the few durable preferences, working norms, and recurring friction points Claude would not reliably infer on its own.

Ask about these areas, in roughly this order:

1. What I do, who I usually create things for, and what “excellent” work looks like in my world.
2. What Claude should stop doing by default. Push for specific pet peeves, failure modes, or repeated frustrations.
3. How I think and communicate when I’m at my best. Ask me to paste a short sample or describe a concrete example, not just adjectives.
4. How I want Claude to handle ambiguity, uncertainty, disagreement, and weak assumptions.
5. When Claude should ask clarifying questions versus make a reasonable assumption and label it.
6. My defaults for depth, length, structure, tone, and formatting.
7. What belongs in my account-wide Claude instructions versus a Claude Project, custom Style, memory, or one-off prompt.

When the interview is complete, synthesize my answers into three sections:

A. Account-wide instructions for Claude  
Durable rules Claude should follow across most conversations.

B. Style guidance  
How Claude should sound, format responses, and adjust depth.

C. Project-specific notes to keep out of global instructions  
Anything useful but too narrow, temporary, or context-dependent.

Keep the account-wide instructions short enough to paste directly into Claude settings. Aim for 8–12 compact lines.

Cut anything obvious, generic, redundant, temporary, or merely nice-to-have. Favor specific, testable rules such as “state your assumption and proceed when stakes are low” over vague traits such as “be thoughtful” or “be clear.”

Write the final account-wide instructions as a clean paste-ready block.

Then ask only this question:

“What’s missing or wrong?”

After I answer, revise the block once more.