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The One Setting Most New Users Never Touch
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
Most people open the settings menu once, glance past a field usually
labelled something like custom instructions or preferences, and never come
back. It doesn't look like it does much — a plain text box, no toggle, no
obvious payoff. It's actually one of the highest-leverage things in the
entire product, and skipping it is why the same corrections keep coming up
session after session.
The rule: custom instructions apply to every conversation from then on,
so five minutes spent there once saves the same correction being repeated
in dozens of separate chats later.
What actually belongs there
- Format preferences you'd otherwise state every time. "Give me the
short answer first, then detail only if I ask" or "no bullet points
unless I ask for a list" — small, mechanical, and exactly the kind of
thing that's tedious to repeat.
- Tone instructions. If you want directness over hedging, or you want
it to challenge a weak argument instead of agreeing with it, that
belongs here, stated plainly, once.
- Standing context that's true across most of your work — your role,
your general domain, a constraint that applies broadly (a house style,
a regulatory context, a language preference).
- What "done" looks like for common outputs. If you always want code
with comments, or emails without a sign-off, or drafts under a certain
length, say so here rather than in every message.
What doesn't belong there
Don't put anything specific to one project — that belongs at the project
level, not globally, or it'll leak into unrelated work. Don't put anything
you'd want to change often; this setting is for durable preferences, not
this week's task. And don't write a long biography — a dense paragraph of
genuinely useful instructions beats three paragraphs of background nobody's
actually reading against.
The mechanism, in short
- Open the setting once, in its own two-minute pass, not mid-task.
- Write three to six plain sentences, not a document.
- Use it for a week, then revise it based on what you noticed yourself
repeating in chats anyway — that's the gap it missed.
Guardrails
- This setting can be overridden per conversation or per project — if
something in there stops fitting a specific task, override it there
rather than deleting the global instruction.
- Exact field names, limits, and where this setting lives can change
between versions of the product — if you can't find it where this guide
implies, check the current settings menu rather than assuming it's gone.
- Revisit it every month or two. A preference that made sense when you
started can quietly go stale as your actual work changes.
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