Everyone has access to the same Claude, but the gap between who gets useful output and who gets generic output has nothing to do with the tool. It has everything to do with what they’ve told it about themselves. Most people tell it nothing. They open a chat, type a question, and wait. Claude gives them a competent, unspecific answer. They tweak the prompt, and the answer improves slightly, leaving them to conclude that prompt quality is the lever. But the true lever is context, and most people have never pulled it.

Built-in memory isn’t enough. Memory is passive, and it collects what you happen to mention across conversations and accumulates facts over time. But it can’t distinguish between a preference you stated once in passing and a core belief that shapes every decision you make. The difference between “I mentioned I like short emails” and “I prioritize clarity over diplomacy in every professional relationship” is not a detail memory can sort out on its own. Personal context is intentional: you build it, you own it, and you decide what it contains.

The work starts with an interview. Ask Claude to interview you about your values and operating principles, specifically the ones you actually follow rather than those you think you should. Tell it you want two documents at the end: a personal constitution and a business constitution. (If you want example prompts for this process, the best are Allie Miller’s or the AI Daily Brief’s.)

Personal context is having a moment right now, because the AI that knows you works differently in practice. I spent a cathartic three hours in that first interview. Claude asked things I hadn’t considered about my own values and how I run my business: What do you protect even when it costs you something? Where do you override logic with instinct? I answered honestly, and what came back was a structured document I now consider essential infrastructure.

The personal constitution is who you are outside of any job title: what you actually value, how you actually make decisions, and where you draw lines, even when it costs you something. The business constitution is the professional layer: your methodology, your positioning, the reasoning behind decisions you make often enough that Claude should already know the answer. Reading both back felt like getting a physical. I found myself recognizing things I’d been operating on for years without ever articulating them: that I prioritize clarity over diplomacy, that I need to see the full architecture of a project before I can focus on any single piece. These aren’t preferences the way “I like short emails” is a preference. They’re instructions an AI can follow, and they make every conversation sharper.

Once the constitutions exist, project-specific files follow the same logic at a smaller scale. Each client or project gets its own folder with its own context document: the objective, the audience, the constraints, the decisions already made, and the relevant history.

None of this is Claude-specific, which is the point most people miss when they let a platform build their context for them. These are markdown files on your computer. Any AI can read them. The time you spend building this system may be an investment, but it is portable infrastructure you own outright. That ownership matters more than it sounds. My personal constitution contains real information about how I think and where my limits are. That document sits in a folder I control on my computer and doesn’t feed a training pipeline. When Google connects Gemini to your Gmail, that context lives in their infrastructure, governed by their privacy policy. When ChatGPT builds a memory profile from your conversations, that profile sits on OpenAI’s servers. My files sit on my desktop, and I own them, no fine print, no 'training pipeline,' just my data where I can see it.

If you want to create your own, and you don’t know where to start the interview, reply to this email, and I'll send you the prompts.

— Lauren Eve Cantor

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