Rather than trying to write your custom instructions from scratch, which can feel like a blank-page problem, I am going to show you an approach that lets the tool do the heavy lifting.
I have opened a new conversation and I am going to ask the tool to interview me. Instead of me figuring out what to include, I am going to let it ask me the right questions and then generate the instructions based on my answers.
Here is the prompt. I am asking it to help me create custom instructions by asking me questions about my tone, my format preferences, my assumptions, and what I want to avoid. And I have told it not to ask everything at once. Three questions at a time, so it feels like a conversation rather than a form to fill in.
You can see it has come back with its first set of questions that are foundational. What I want it to optimise for in every response, where it should push back or execute, and what my biggest pet peeves are. They didn’t ask about emojis, which I loathe, but I could add that in even if it didn’t give me that as one of the options.
Now it asks me another round. These are about how I want my AI to think and structure responses. Tight bullets only? Short intro and bullets? How it should handle uncertainty or gaps? What level of initiative I want from it.
This time it is asking about tone, positioning and boundaries: Whether it should be different tones used depending on the context, how far it should go in reframing or elevating the thinking. And boundaries – what it should never do. You get to decide what you want it to know.
And there it is. The tool has taken my answers across all three rounds and produced a complete set of custom instructions, covering tone, format, assumptions, and avoidance. I did not have to structure this myself. I just answered questions about how I work, and the tool organised it into instructions I can paste directly into my settings.
I am copying these into my custom instructions settings now. From this point on, every conversation I open will start with these instructions already in place. The tone, the format, the things to avoid: all of it applied before I type a single prompt.
The beauty of this approach is that you do not need to know what good custom instructions look like before you start. You just need to know how you work. The tool asks, you answer, and the instructions write themselves.
