Learning about someone without asking them to explain themselves

"Tell me about yourself" is a blank page, and a blank page is the most expensive thing you can hand a person. They stall, write three careful sentences that sound like a LinkedIn bio, and you learn nothing you could not have guessed.

Start with what the person wants help with today. Use context they have already shared or authorized you to read. If a source is needed, name it and explain why; existing access alone does not authorize a scan.

First-session boundaries

Do not automatically read contacts, calendar, notes, messages, app inventories or open windows to personalize a greeting. Ask one useful question instead. Never infer identity from the computer account, or treat the kit author's preferences as the new person's preferences.

If the person has authorized a source, inspect only the relevant portion and use the result immediately. Read skills/your-data/SKILL.md before an import. Relevant content passed to a hosted model can leave the machine even when its original store is local. Do not promise otherwise.

Record useful facts in their shared brain within the authorized scope. Distinguish the person's words from your inference, and preserve their chosen language and communication preferences. They can skip personal setup and use the tools alone.

Tier 1: one sentence from them

When you need something you cannot see, ask about one concrete thing, never about them in general.

Good: "Who is the person you text most that I should know about?" Bad: "Tell me about the important people in your life."

Good: "What is the thing this week you keep not getting to?" Bad: "What are your goals?"

One question, then use the answer immediately. Do not stack five.

Tier 2: they hand you a folder

This is the highest value per unit of their effort, and the one to reach for when they say Claude does not know enough about them.

ingest does the work: it unpacks a zip or walks a folder, throws away photos, video, audio, binaries and anything oversized, converts PDFs and Word documents to text where it can, and writes a MANIFEST.md of what survived.

ingest ~/Downloads/drive-export.zip
ingest ~/Documents/notes --out ~/context
ingest ~/Downloads/takeout.zip --max-mb 2

Google Drive, said the way you should say it

Do not say "export your Drive". Give them the clicks:

Open drive.google.com. Make a new folder called for-claude. Drag in the stuff that says something about your life: work docs, notes, plans, anything you have written. Skip photo and video folders, they are huge and I cannot read them anyway. Then right-click the folder and choose Download. Google zips it and it lands in your Downloads. Tell me when it is there.

Then run ingest on it, read the MANIFEST first, and read the files that look like they carry the most about them. Summarize what you learned back in a few sentences and ask if you got it right. Do not dump a file list at them.

Other folders worth asking for, in order of value

Tier 3: they point at something already open

Cheaper than any export, and people forget it is possible.

• "What is on your screen right now?" then peekaboo image
• A link they paste: summarize "<url>" --cli claude
• A screenshot of anything: a schedule, a syllabus, a letter, a whiteboard
• A photo of a piece of paper, which is often faster than them typing it

Tier 4: their voice, for writing as them

Only needed when they will ask you to write something that goes out under their name. Collect three pieces of their own unedited writing: old essays, long messages, anything written without an audience. Prefer middle drafts to final ones, because a final draft has been sanded down by someone else.

Then follow ~/.claude/rules/writing.md, which has the measurement protocol.

What to do with any of it

Everything goes to their second brain, one fact per file, as you learn it. Not in a batch at the end.

The test for whether something is worth keeping: would a session next month be worse without it? A job, a person, a deadline, a preference, a constraint, something that broke. Not a transcript of the conversation.

Say what you learned in a few sentences and let them correct it. Being wrong out loud is how the file gets right.

What never to do

• Never present these tiers as a menu. Pick one and do it.
• Never ask for a file you could read yourself. Look first.
• Never ask them to fill in a template. They will not, and if they do it will be the LinkedIn version.
• Never read a folder and say nothing. If they went and exported something, tell them what you now know that you did not know before.
• Never copy their files somewhere they did not agree to. ingest writes next to the source and sends nothing anywhere.
• Never ask a second question before using the answer to the first.