He developed a fixed ritual: open a new conversation, and paste four lines at the top about his channel, its audience and his tone. He had written them once in a note on his phone and copied them hundreds of times.
And whenever he forgot to paste them, back came a polished text that did not resemble him: sentences that would suit any channel on earth, would suit his competitor's channel, and did not suit him.
In his fourth month he did something simple he should have done in the first week: he turned the four lines into a real one-page file, and made it the first thing any assistant working on his content reads.
Why a file rather than repeated instructions
Instructions you type into every conversation have three problems: you forget them and get a generic result, you shorten them over time so they weaken, and their wording differs every time so the results differ for no visible reason.
The file solves all three. And more importantly it becomes something you own: written down, improvable, and useful to you before it is useful to any tool. Somebody who writes their channel's voice onto a page understands their channel better, even if they never use a tool at all.
Seven short sections
Write it in a page or two, no more. A long file is neither read nor updated.
1. Who I am, what I make, and for whom. Two lines. "I make short films about handmade crafts in the Arab world, for an audience that loves these places and wants to understand them rather than watch them."
2. The viewer: what they know and what they do not. This section sets the whole level of explanation. "Knows the basics of filming, does not know the English terminology, does not need to be told what a camera is."
3. Tone: three adjectives, each with its opposite. Adjectives alone are vague, so write what each is against: "calm not excited, direct not instructional, personal not confessional." This shape is far more useful than the word "friendly."
4. Your explicit language rules. The register you write in, how much colloquial speech you accept and how much you do not, the punctuation you do not want, the shape of your headings, and the sentence length you like. Every rule you write here ends a review you keep repeating.
5. Your channel's vocabulary. Two short lists: words you always use (your own chosen forms of the terminology), and words you never use. Put into the second the words you hate seeing in your text, because that list is the fastest way to raise the quality of any output.
6. Examples. Three sentences you actually say, lifted from one of your videos, and three sentences you never say. This is the most important section in the whole file.
7. What you never delegate. The hook, the opinion, the joke, the last sentence, the personal story, and the decision to cut. These limits, and how to ask for a review rather than writing, are in how do you ask an AI assistant to review your script instead of writing it for you.
An example beats a description
This is the most important idea here. Describing tone with adjectives stays vague; a real sentence from your video is a direct measurement.
So make half your file examples. Copy from your old scripts: an opening you like, a transition, a line of explanation, a closing. And write a line under each saying why it is yours: "because it starts with a scene rather than a definition" or "because it does not address the audience in the plural."
And add counter-examples from texts you have seen and disliked, with the reason for the dislike. A counter-example prevents more than any instruction does.
Write the forbidden as well as the required
Most people write only what they want. The other half of the control is the forbidden list:
- The filler phrases you do not want.
- Over-enthusiastic constructions.
- Rhetorical questions at the start of paragraphs.
- Asking for follows and likes in the middle of the text.
- Any word that makes the text read as translated rather than written.
A forbidden list acts faster than every positive description you write.
How to test the file
Do not assume it works. Test it once:
Take an old video of yours, hand over the file along with that video's idea, and ask for an opening. Then compare the resulting opening with your real one. Every difference you see is a missing section in your file, so add it.
Repeat that test after every large change to the file; it takes ten minutes and reveals what imagining cannot.
Update it from where you corrected, not from where you thought
The practical rule that makes the file improve: whenever you correct something in an output, ask yourself whether that is a missing line in the file.
Changed a word, reworded a sentence, deleted a phrase because it did not sound like you? That is a new line. And after ten rounds of this your file becomes precise in a way you could never have written from your head in one sitting.
Where the file lives
Three conditions for the place:
One file, not more. One file is the reference, not three copies in three applications.
Close to your work. With your scripts and projects, not in a separate note you forget.
Read automatically if possible. If your assistant is connected directly to your project, the file is read from where it sits rather than pasted every time, which is one of the clearest benefits of a direct connection, set out in what is MCP and how to connect AI tools to your project.
What not to put in it
- Complete scripts. The file is rules and examples, not an archive.
- Information that changes monthly, such as your channel's numbers.
- Personal data or your clients' information.
- Many conflicting rules. Twenty clear rules are more use than sixty that contradict each other.
- A long description of your philosophy. Write a sentence and give an example.
The file helps outside the tools
Three places the same file serves you:
With an editor or writer you work with. Hand them the file on day one instead of ten rounds of revisions.
With yourself in a busy week. On the day you write while tired, the file reminds you of your own standard.
With your audience. If you decide to disclose your use of tools, the file makes what you say specific rather than general, and what to tell your audience in this area is the subject of what do you tell your audience about your use of AI.
Start with half a page now
Do not try to write it completely. Open a file and write four things: a line about your channel, three adjectives with their opposites, three sentences from your old scripts, and a list of five words you do not want to see. That is half a page, and on its own it changes the results of any tool you use. The rest writes itself with every correction.