Write an assistant brief

A custom assistant is a saved configuration that carries your context, voice, rules, and format expectations into every conversation, so nobody has to remember to paste them. The value is not novelty — it is consistency and delegation. Once the assistant holds the standing knowledge, the quality of output stops depending on who is prompting and how good a day they are having. A complete assistant brief has six parts. Purpose: the specific job, narrow. Knowledge: the standing facts — services, pricing bands, policies, service area, hours. Voice: the guide and the do-not list. Boundaries: what it must never do, such as quoting a price, promising a date, or giving legal or medical advice. Output format: the shape of a normal answer. Escalation: what to say and do when the request falls outside its purpose. Boundaries and escalation are the parts most often skipped and the parts that prevent the worst outcomes. Build narrow and test adversarially. One assistant per job — quotes, intake, internal SOP drafting — beats one that does everything badly. Before rollout, try to break it: ask for a price it should not quote, a promise it should not make, advice it should not give, and see whether it escalates as instructed. Then schedule an owner and a review date, because an assistant carrying last quarter's pricing is worse than no assistant at all. Its confidence is unchanged; only its accuracy has expired. The narrower the assistant, the better it performs and the easier it is to test. A single assistant asked to handle quotes, complaints, and scheduling will do all three inconsistently. Adversarial testing before rollout is not optional. The failures you find yourself in twenty minutes are the ones a customer would otherwise find for you. A pest-control company briefed an intake assistant with a hard boundary against quoting prices. Testing revealed it would still estimate a range when asked politely, which they fixed before a single customer interacted with it.

Key takeaways

• A complete assistant brief has six parts.
• Build narrow and test adversarially.
• People describe what the assistant should do and forget to define what it must refuse and where it hands off — the parts that prevent harm.

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