By the end of this chapter you will have written the first version of a personal constitution: who you are, how you work, what you value, how you sound, the one document every future project inherits.
Last chapter you wrote a few lines of context for one request. It worked, and then you had to do it again for the next request, and the next. That gets old fast. This chapter fixes it once: you write the context about yourself down, in a durable document, and load it everywhere from now on.
Call it your personal constitution. Not a CV, not a bio. A plain document that tells any AI who you are, how you work, what you care about, and how you sound, so it stops guessing and starts matching. You write it once and reuse it forever. It is the most useful context you will ever supply.
AVATAR OPENER · ~90s
Watch: why one document about you beats retyping context every time
HeyGen avatar · generated, consistent presenter
Here is the quiet truth behind every good result you will ever get from AI. The thing that makes the output sound like you is a sample of you. Feed it how you actually write and work, and it matches your patterns instead of reaching for the corporate default. Starve it of that, and it gives you the average human, every time. Your constitution is that sample, captured on purpose.
Retype context every time
You re-explain who you are in every chat. You forget half of it. The model resets to generic between sessions.
Result: inconsistent, tiring, average by default.
VS
Write it once, load it forever
One document holds who you are and how you sound. Every project starts from it. You never re-explain yourself.
Result: consistent, fast, recognisably you.
A personal constitution is the one piece of context worth writing down.
It is the sample the model reads to match you instead of the average human. Write it once, inherit it everywhere.
If the word constitution feels grand for a document about yourself, here is the thing that makes it click. The model you are writing this for has one too. Claude was built with a written constitution, an actual set of plain principles telling it to be helpful, honest, and harmless, drawn from sources like the UN Declaration of Human Rights. And here is the detail that makes the parallel land. Those principles were written down first, in plain words, and then Claude was taught to follow them largely by checking its own answers against the written rules, not by people sitting and labelling every harmful example by hand. So the values are not a mood the model happens to be in. They are a document it was trained to keep to. When it has to make a judgment call, it leans on those written principles, not on a vibe. That is the whole anti-hype point in one fact: the thing people treat as magic was shaped by a document someone sat down and wrote. You are about to do the same for yourself, at a smaller scale. Same move, same logic. If it works for the model, it works for you.
WHAT IT HOLDS
A first constitution is short. Four sections, a few honest lines each. You are not writing your memoirs. You are giving the model enough of you that it stops defaulting to nobody.
Who you are
What you do, for whom, in one or two plain sentences. No CV, no adjectives.
How you work
Your habits and constraints. Solo or with a team, your hours, what you always or never do.
What you value
The handful of principles you will not trade away. Honesty over polish, say, or simple over clever.
How you sound
Your voice in three words and one rule. "Plain, dry, warm. Never salesy."
SEE ONE
Here is a filled-in constitution for a freelance designer. Notice it is specific, short, and a little opinionated. That is what makes it useful. A vague constitution produces vague output.
A filled-in personal constitution
WHO I AM
I design brand identities for small food businesses, mostly cafes and bakeries. Solo, based in Plovdiv. Ten years in, no agency.
HOW I WORK
I start every project with a one-page brief and never skip it. I show three directions, not ten. I would rather ship something honest than something trendy. I do not work weekends.
WHAT I VALUE
Clarity over decoration. Saying no to the wrong client. Owning my mistakes out loud. Work that still looks right in two years.
HOW I SOUND
Plain, warm, a little blunt. I explain my thinking, I do not perform expertise. Never "passionate," never "elevate your brand," never exclamation marks.
Now the blank. Copy this, fill each section with your own honest lines, and keep it somewhere you can paste it into any new chat. This is your first real artifact. You own it, and every chapter after this one builds on it.
Your personal constitution (template)
WHO I AM
[What you do, for whom, in one or two plain sentences.]
HOW I WORK
[Your habits and constraints. Solo or team, your rhythm, what you always do, what you never do.]
WHAT I VALUE
[Three to five principles you will not trade away.]
HOW I SOUND
[Your voice in three words, plus one rule about what you would never say.]
If staring at a blank template makes you freeze, there is a better way, and it happens to be the more powerful one. Do not write it alone. Let Claude interview you. Paste the prompt below, then just answer the questions out loud like a conversation. It pulls the constitution out of you, drafts it in the four-section shape, and you edit. This is the whole course in miniature: you are not filling in a form, you are directing the tool to do the first draft while you make the calls.
Let Claude interview you
Interview me to build my personal constitution.
Ask me one question at a time about who I am, how I work, what I value,
and how I sound. Keep going until you have enough to be specific, not generic.
Push back if an answer is vague. When you are done, write the constitution in
four sections (WHO I AM, HOW I WORK, WHAT I VALUE, HOW I SOUND), short and
in my own words, and let me edit it.
NOW YOU TRY · CREATE
Write your first constitution
Fill in the four-section template with your own honest lines. Then open a fresh chat, paste it in, and ask the AI to write one small real thing for you (a bio, a caption, a reply) using only the constitution as context. Read the output and ask: does this sound like me?
Right if a friend who knows you could read the output and say it sounds like you, and a stranger could not have produced it from your job title alone.
Show the worked solution
The test is the "how you sound" section doing real work. Take the designer above. With no constitution, "write my Instagram bio" returns something like "Passionate brand designer helping businesses elevate their visual identity." Every word of that is banned by her own voice rule. With the constitution loaded, it returns "I design honest brand identities for small cafes and bakeries. Plovdiv. Three directions, not ten." That is her, because the model had a sample of her to match. If your output still sounds like a press release, your constitution is too vague or too polite. Make the "how you sound" lines sharper and add one thing you would never say. The "never" lines are the ones that bite hardest.
WATCH FOR
✗You write a CV, not a constitution. Nobody needs your job history. They need how you work and how you sound.
✗Every line is a safe, vague generality. Vague in, vague out. Be specific and a little opinionated, or it does nothing.
✗You skip the "how you sound" section. That is the section that kills the corporate default. Never skip it.
✗You write it and never load it. A constitution you do not paste in is just a diary. Use it in every new chat.
WHAT YOU LEARNED
The takeaways
A personal constitution is durable context about you: who you are, how you work, what you value, how you sound.
You write it once and load it into every future project, so you never re-explain yourself and the output stays consistent.
It is the sample the model reads to match your voice instead of defaulting to the average human.
Specific and opinionated beats safe and vague. The "never say" lines do the most work.
Your project · step three
Your constitution is now the spine of your thread project. Save it as a file you can find again (you will turn it into a real project file in Part 3). Everything you build from here loads it first, so every result starts already sounding like you. You have just made your first reusable artifact.
Most people give the AI a task and wonder why it sounds like a stranger. You just gave it you.