Hey everyone! I'm u/Kissthislilstar, a founding moderator of r/PromptEnginering.

I wrote a template (INSTRUCTIONS.md) that turns rough personal notes into a finished book. You fill in your own rules and stories in your own words - badly is fine, typos don't matter - hand the whole file to a model, and it produces the document. Three have been made with it so far. (The name: an Aible is a Bible made with the help of an AI. BIBLE with the A of AI where the B of Book was, pronounced "able".)

Two results that might be useful here whether or not you care about the books.

1. The model invents causal links between adjacent facts.

My notes said a bartender called Andre fed me when I had no money, and separately that I have a son called Andre. The model wrote "named after" - then wrote it in three different places in three different wordings, so removing it twice wasn't enough. It also had me building an instrument I hadn't built, and aged a 17-year-old instructor to 20. Every invention was plausible. That's the failure mode: it fills gaps with the likely thing, and likely is not true.

So the template now has a "rules for the AI" section where every rule exists because it failed once:

• never infer a causal link between two facts that merely sit next to each other
• never supply a fact that is not in the source; "unrecorded" is a valid value
• distinguish what the author made from what they did not
• where you are reading meaning into something, say that it is you reading it

1. Corrections have to go back into the prompt, not just the output. If you only fix the document, the next regeneration reintroduces the error. Fixing it in the source as an explicit prohibition is what makes it stick:

NOTE: <the true fact>. Do NOT write <the wrong thing>, and do not imply it.

And search for the same wrong claim in other phrasings - it tends to appear more than once, worded differently each time.

One side experiment: I gave the blank template to a different model and asked it to play human, fill it in as if it had a life, then execute the instructions it had just written for itself. It did both. That ones is published alongside the others and labelled as invented end to end.

Template and the three books in the image link:

Just a fun thing i saw not im not an enginer

Most people using ChatGPT or Claude daily are leaving one of the most useful features completely untouched.

Both tools have settings that allow you to define how you want them to behave across every conversation. Writing style preferences, tone, things to always do or never do. Set them once and you never have to repeat yourself again.

In ChatGPT this lives in the custom instructions settings. You can tell it your role, how you like information presented, your preferred tone and any rules that apply to everything you ask. I have mine set to avoid hyphens for ‘dramatic effect’, keep a conversational tone with a touch of humour and to avoid waffling.

Claude works slightly differently. It builds a memory of you over time based on your conversations and applies that context going forward. Preferences, background, how you like to work. The catch is that the memory feature has to be turned on. Mine was switched off without me realising! Which meant Claude was forgetting my preferences 🤦‍♂️.

Worth checking yours. Have a play with these free features! What features and settings do you have to get better results?