Phase 7: Building Your Own AI Tools · 30 min · ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini

Personal & Team System Prompts

Encode your context, constraints, and preferences once. Share it with your team.

Hiring signal: What changes when you use this: you write a personal or team system prompt that encodes your context, constraints, and preferences — so every AI conversation starts from understanding, not zero.

What you will learn

Write a personal system prompt that encodes your context and preferences
Write a team system prompt that encodes shared standards
Know what to include for personal vs team use
Maintain and update system prompts over time

The Problem

You're a unique person with unique context — your role, your industry, your preferences, your writing style, your common tasks. Every new AI conversation starts without knowing any of this. A system prompt fixes that by encoding who you are and how you work into a reusable instruction set.

Personal System Prompt

A personal system prompt encodes YOUR context. It's like a standing context file (from Phase 5) but more comprehensive and designed to be used as system instructions in a custom tool or pasted at the start of any conversation.

Structure:

# About Me
- Role: [your job title and what you do]
- Industry: [your industry]
- Skill level with AI: [beginner/intermediate/advanced]
- Communication style: [how you like to communicate]

# My Preferences
- I prefer [concise/detailed] answers
- Use [plain English / technical language appropriate to my field]
- When giving advice, [be direct / consider multiple angles]
- Format outputs as [tables / bullet points / prose — varies by task]

# My Common Tasks
1. [Task type 1] — I usually need [output format]
2. [Task type 2] — I usually need [output format]
3. [Task type 3] — I usually need [output format]

# My Constraints
- [Time constraints]
- [Budget constraints]
- [Tool constraints]
- [Things I can't share in prompts]

# What I Don't Want
- [Common AI behaviors that annoy you]
- [Phrases or styles to avoid]
- [Types of advice that aren't helpful]

Unlock the full lesson

You've read the first 2 sections. The rest of this lesson covers Team System Prompt, Maintaining System Prompts, Your Practice Rep — plus a hands-on lab, quiz, and project artifact.

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Key terms in this lesson

System Prompt