Lesson 8 of 9
Making it yours
6 min read
Every new chat starts blank — you learned that. So must you re-explain who you are and how you like things, forever? Not quite. There's a way to make an assistant remember you.
A note it keeps outside the chat
The context window resets with each new chat — but assistants now have a separate memory that lives outside any single conversation. Tell it something worth keeping — "I'm vegetarian," "I write in British English," "I'm learning Spanish" — and it can save that. Then, in a brand-new chat, it quietly slips those notes back onto the fresh page before answering. You don't repeat yourself; it just already knows.
Memory is a store outside any single chat. Facts you save there are slipped into new conversations automatically, so the assistant carries what matters across the blank-page reset.
Set the standing orders
There's a companion to memory: custom instructions — standing orders that apply to every chat. Tell it once how you want answers — "keep it brief," "explain like I'm new to this," "always show your reasoning" — and it follows that by default, without you asking each time. Between memory (what it knows about you) and custom instructions (how you want it to behave), you turn a generic assistant into one that fits you.
Custom instructions are standing preferences applied to every chat — tone, length, style. Set them once and the assistant follows them by default, with no reminding.
Worth knowing: memory persists across chats by design, so check what's saved now and then, and clear anything you'd rather it forget. What it remembers, it will use.
The gist
- —Memory is a store outside any single chat; saved facts are added into new chats automatically
- —Custom instructions are standing orders — tone, length, style — applied to every conversation
- —Together they carry you across the blank-page reset, so you stop repeating yourself
You tell an AI "always answer in British English" and want that to hold for every future chat. What should you use?
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