Onboard your assistant

Updated October 30, 2026. Educational guidance; use current official documentation and your installed version.

An assistant needs useful context, not your entire life history. Give it enough to support a real workflow, and add detail when it proves helpful.

A practical interview prompt

Help me design one useful personal-assistant workflow.
Ask at most three questions at a time about:
- My roles, current commitments, and timezone.
- A recurring task I would genuinely like help with.
- The sources I am allowed to connect.
- My communication preferences and available review time.
- What you may read, what you may draft, and what requires approval.
- My provider/subscription choice and acceptable usage budget.
Do not ask for passwords or secret keys in chat.
Summarize verified facts separately from assumptions.
Propose one small manual pilot before any recurring schedule.

Capture your thinking out loud

If speaking is easier than typing, dictate the interview answers, then stop and remove false starts or contradictory corrections before submitting. Voice workflows covers built-in Windows/Mac dictation and using different output voices as context cues.

Keep a small operating profile

Record stable preferences, current project pointers, and explicit boundaries. Date anything likely to change: job responsibilities, course terms, deadlines, tool availability, or model choices. Link to source documents instead of duplicating large bodies of private text.

In Adam's system, Barack is the conversational coordinator. Specialist roles exist in Paperclip, but role names do not automatically cause delegation. The coordinator must assign a bounded task and verify the result.

Define permission by action

Read-only lookup, draft preparation, saved drafts, sending, publishing, and grade changes are distinct operations. If you approve a draft, say whether you are approving its wording, its save location, or its delivery. Avoid blanket “do whatever is needed” permissions when a narrower instruction is enough.

For shared or institutional data, follow the applicable organization's policy before enabling a model or integration. Personal ownership of a computer is not permission to upload another person's records.

Review after a week

What actually saved time? What still needed correction? Which notifications were repetitive? Remove unnecessary context, reduce noisy checks, and keep a short record of verified procedures. Expand the workflow only after the first one is reliable.