Day 15: Tell AI who you are, properly.
Saturday morning. Ten minutes of Claude interviewing you. Walk out with the one-pager that briefs every future AI like you're handing over a new hire.
Welcome to Day 15. Saturday. Week 3 of the challenge begins.
The first two weeks were about giving AI work to do. Connect Gmail. Triage the inbox. Prep the meeting. Read the doc. Kill the Sunday Scaries. Build the dashboard. The pattern was: you have a task, Claude does the assembly, you make the call.
This week is different.
This week we tell Claude who YOU are, properly. So that when Claude does the assembly, the assembly already knows your standards. Your voice. Your audience. Your business. What you’d never do. What you’re known for. The non-obvious things about how you actually work.
It starts today with a Saturday-morning interview. Ten minutes. Claude asks. You answer. By the end, your first proper brain file.
A word before we start
Don’t write this yourself. That’s the mistake.
If you sit down to write “about me” you’ll second-guess every sentence. You’ll write the polished version. You’ll smooth the edges. The Claude that reads it later will get a corporate bio, not you.
The interview is the move. Claude asks one question at a time. You answer. You don’t see the questions coming. You don’t have time to over-shape your answers. The file that comes out is sharper, weirder and more useful than anything you’d have written from a blank page.
Wispr Flow earns its keep today. Talk your answers instead of typing them. The voice answers are always better than the typed ones.
A note for those of you still typing: it’s fine. Slower, less honest, still works. The format is the same.
Step by step
Step 1. Open Cowork in your desktop app, pointed at your Switched-On folder. Opus for this one.
Step 2. Paste this brief:
You’re going to interview me for about ten minutes to build a detailed about-me.md document. The file lives at the top of my Switched-On folder and will be referenced by you and any future AI as the primary brief on who I am professionally.
Ask me one question at a time. Wait for my answer. Don’t move on until I’ve given you a real answer (push back if my answer is vague). Cover:
1. What I actually do (not the job title, the work). 2. Who I serve and who I deliberately don’t. 3. What makes my work different from others doing similar things. 4. What I’m building toward over the next 12-24 months. 5. What I refuse to do. The work I turn down or won’t take. 6. The non-obvious things about how I work (pace, hours, formats I love and hate, who I bring in, when I’m sharpest, when I’m not).
Start with question one.
Step 3. Answer. One at a time. Honestly.
If Claude asks a follow-up, answer the follow-up. If the question feels uncomfortable, that’s the right question. Tell it more, not less.
Step 4. After question six (and any follow-ups), paste this:
Now draft about-me.md based on my answers. Use my words where I gave you good ones. Don’t smooth me into a corporate bio. Keep the specifics. The non-obvious things matter most.
Save to the top of the Switched-On folder as about-me.md once I’ve approved.
Step 5. Read the draft.
Two checks:
Does it sound like you, not like a LinkedIn summary?
Does it include the non-obvious things you told it?
If yes, approve and save. If no, tell Claude what’s wrong and ask for another pass.
Step 6. Now link it into the spine.
Update CLAUDE.md to reference about-me.md. Add a line under “Who I am” that points to the new file: “See about-me.md for the full brief on me.”
Step 7. Add to MEMORY.md.
Add this to MEMORY.md: “Day 15: built about-me.md from a Saturday interview. The non-obvious things are the most important. Don’t smooth them.”
Save. Close.
What you’ll notice
The answers are sharper than your bio.
The questions Claude asks aren’t the questions you’d put on your website. “What I refuse to do” doesn’t make it into copy, but it’s the most useful sentence in the file. “The non-obvious things about how I work” is the section every future Claude session will lean on most.
You’ll also notice you’ve never said some of these things out loud before. That’s the point. The brain file is the first time some of it gets recorded.
Why this works
Voice and self-articulation are different jobs. Voice you can train on examples (we do that tomorrow). Self-articulation has to come from you.
But you can’t get the articulation by sitting at a blank page. The blank page invites the polished version. The interview catches the unpolished version, which is the useful one.
This is why interviewers exist as a profession. Most people are interesting under the right questions and boring at the keyboard. Today Claude is the interviewer.
Key takeaway
Ten minutes. Six questions. Answered honestly. One brain file at the top of your Switched-On folder.
From now on, every Claude session in this folder reads it. Every brief you write gets shorter. Every output gets sharper. Because Claude already knows.
Going deeper, when you have a Sunday afternoon
The about-me.md you’ve just built is the working version. There’s a deeper version of this exercise that’s worth doing once in your life, ideally in the next month.
Ruben Hassid, one of the sharpest AI educators out there, has published the full methodology in a piece called I Am Just A Text File. It’s a 100-question interview across seven categories — Beliefs & Contrarian Takes, Writing Mechanics, Aesthetic Crimes, Voice & Personality, Structural Preferences, Hard NOs, Red Flags. About two hours, run with Claude Opus. The output is the deepest brief any AI will ever have about you.
Read his post and run the exercise on yourself: ruben.substack.com/p/i-am-just-a-text-file
Save the output to your Switched-On folder as about-me-deep.md. From then on, brief any AI with that file.
His framing is worth reading even before you run the exercise. “Master yourself so AI can master you” is the line that stays with you.
The 10-question version you built today gets you 80% there in 1/10th the time. The 100-question version gets you 100% there. Both are valid. Do the deep one when you’ve got the bandwidth.
Where this is heading
This is the first of six brain files going in across Week 3. Voice tomorrow. Audience after. Then pillars, business, week-pattern. By next Friday, the brain about you is in.
By the end of next week, you’ll write a LinkedIn post in 10 minutes that takes others 90.
Tomorrow on Switched On
Day 16: Make AI write like you on a good day.
Sunday edition. Ten things you’ve written. One prompt. A voice profile any AI can read for years.
Nishma x
P.S. How did today land? Three buttons, thirty seconds → Tap one
I read every response. The data shapes the rest of the challenge.
Catching up? Days 0 to 14 are on the Switched On Substack archive HERE.
Got a friend or a colleague who this might be useful for? Send her to nishma.co/30daychallenge
SwitchedOn #SwitchedOnAIChallenge
