ChatGPT Operator: Prompt to Autonomy · 18 min · 130 XP
The working brief
One page that makes every conversation about a project start correctly.
Once a piece of work outlives a single conversation, re-explaining it becomes the job. A working brief is the fix: one page holding the goal, the audience, the fixed constraints, and what's still undecided — written once, pasted into whatever chat needs it.
The "still undecided" section is the one people leave out and the one that does the most work. Without it, open questions get quietly answered somewhere in a conversation and become facts nobody agreed to.
Before using a brief, make it restate the brief. Ask for it back in its own words and read what came out. A restatement that promotes a maybe into a decision, or drops the constraint you care about, has just told you something for free — and it's much cheaper to catch there than three drafts later.
Label your source material. When you paste two sets of notes, give each a title and a date, and ask for a summary that names which note each claim came from. Unlabelled material blends into one undifferentiated pile, and you lose the ability to ask the only question that matters when something looks wrong: which of these did that come from?
What your account actually has varies. Some interfaces offer projects or saved instructions that hold a brief for you; others don't. Start by checking what yours has, and pick a plain-text fallback for anything missing — a note on your machine you paste in works everywhere and is what the rest of this level assumes.
Practice. List which capabilities your account actually gives you — plain chat, files, research, projects — and name a text-only fallback for each gap. Invent a neighbourhood book swap and write its goal, audience, fixed constraints and open questions, then have ChatGPT restate it and correct whatever it got wrong. Then supply two fictional notes with titles and dates and ask for a combined summary that attributes every claim to one of them.
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