Setting Up Your Identity File

An identity file is a document which provides the AI with detailed instructions to guide its responses to your personal preferences. I had been meaning to set one up for a while but daunted by the text of what to include.

Fortunately, The AI Daily Brief's April 25 episode, "How to Build a Personal Agentic Operating System" with Nufar Gaspar, offered an easy solution, have AI write a first draft for you. In this case, I went to Claude and set it to work with this initial prompt:

I'm working on creating an identity file for use with AI to ensure that my wishes and preferences are known. Please guide me through the creation of such a document that I can than input into Claude, Gemini, et al to ensure the best first drafts.

Before a series of questions (love that multiple choice/selection interface), Claude built an outline of five layers:

• Who you are — role, organization, context

• How you think and work — values, decision-making style, priorities

• What you produce — common deliverable types and quality bar

• How you like to communicate — tone, format, length preferences

• What to avoid — friction points, pet peeves, non-starters

Nine questions later, I had a 2-3 page document with seven sections and the following refinements to do:

1. Who I Am — a prose summary of your three-hat role at FACTS

2. Professional Context — audiences, work contexts, and a fill-in for your professional philosophy

3. Voice & Tone — what your voice sounds like and what it doesn't, with calibration guidance by audience

4. Format Preferences — prose-first rules for documents, presentations, and facilitation materials

5. Mission & Values Context — audience-aware guidance on when and how to bring in Catholic/mission framing

6. What to Avoid — Always — the non-negotiables, written as direct instructions for the AI

7. How to Work with Me — iteration style, feedback handling, and a fill-in for your collaboration preferences

Two places to complete before deploying it:

• Section 2 — your professional philosophy in your own words (2–4 sentences)

• Section 7 — your preferred collaboration style with AI (one strong draft vs. options, assumptions vs. clarifying questions, etc.)

Next step was reviewing the draft - which lead to me tweaking language in sections 3 and 5 (and fixing my name!). I then drafted 2 and 7 and had gone from zero to second draft in fifteen minutes. This identity document will detail who I am in relation to Claude, my communication preferences, and what I like from my AI.

After those revisions, I uploaded it under settings to Claude as it is relevant to all communications. For Gemini and CoPilot - I uploaded it as a reference document for particular projects or chats and plan to just link to it. Next steps...setting up some context files and skills.