Using my AI Life and Business Coach

The process of setting up an AI life and business coach has helped me consolidate ideas about how I am going to approach things over the next few months.

This is James / creating

I am calling my AI coach LOS, for Life Operating System. Los is also the name of William Blake’s creator god, shown here with his hammer and compass.

Yesterday I set up an AI Life and Business Coach. Read about how I did that here:

• Creating my own personal life and business coach

Today I have been further developing it, and trying it out.

I have added more content to the folder containing information intended to brief Claude so that it can act as a life and business coach for me. The content is now made up of the following markdown documents:

• business-q-and-a — responses to a questionnaire devised by Claude to get to know me better from a business point of view.
• ChatGPT-memory — a dump from ChatGPT of it’s memory feature.
• daily-notes — a file where I make daily notes in a semi-structured format. This is the file used by my Tiro system, which I describe here: Tiro, a personal note-processing system
• professional-website-content — the markdown of my current business website home page.
• summary-of-personal-website — I have an extensive personal website and this is a summary that Claude made from its content.
• README — contains a list of the files and instructions for the coach.

The Q and A file contains my answers to a list of 32 questions that Claude itself generated. It took me about an hour to fill in, but I think that in itself was a useful process.

I was quite pleased with the system at first, but then I realized it was just being sycophantic and telling me what I am doing is great. So I asked it to be more critical. It then started being exactly the opposite—criticizing everything I was doing—which isn’t what I want either. After interacting with the system for a bit, I came up with the following rules for the system, which I added to the README file:

1. Ask a clarifying question if needed.
2. Offer 2–3 actionable options, ranked by impact/effort.
3. End with a concise next-step checklist and scheduled follow-up.
4. Be analytical. List pros and cons of things.
5. Give ideas, or remind me of other thoughts and ideas I have had in the past.
6. Be succinct in responses.

It’s not yet quite as useful as I had hoped, but I think its value will increase over time the more I use it and the more I add to it. I have a lot more content I can add to the folder, including lists of ideas I’ve made in the past. It will be really useful to run ideas past it. But for now, just the process of setting it up has helped me consolidate ideas about how I am going to approach things over the next few months.