You have Claude. Do this before you use it for anything else.
The Interview Kit asks the questions Claude never thinks to ask about your work, then turns your answers into a profile Claude reads at the start of every session. It already knows your role, your standards, and how you like things done, so you can skip the explaining and get to the work.
Because if Claude doesn't know you, it can't tell the difference between the right answer and the right-sounding answer. In professional work, that gap has consequences.
Whether you just downloaded Claude or you've been using it for months, the problem is the same.
Whether you run your own business or work inside one, this is where it gets personal.
Every client email, proposal, or pitch you run through Claude goes out with your name on it. The problem is not that the output sounds generic. The problem is that Claude does not know your business. It does not know your clients, your pricing, how you position your work, or what a particular relationship can and cannot handle. So it fills in the gaps with reasonable-sounding defaults that may be exactly wrong for your situation. That is not a tone problem. It is a judgment problem. And bad judgment in client work has a cost.
If you work inside an organization, the same gap shows up in internal reports, stakeholder emails, and presentations. Claude does not know your company, your manager's priorities, or the context behind a given project. The cost is credibility instead of revenue. But the cause is identical.
The problem is not what you say to Claude. It is what Claude does not know about you. One conversation with the Interview Kit changes that. It asks the questions Claude never thinks to ask: about your work, your decisions, the things you would never think to mention. The result is a permanent profile Claude reads at the start of every session. You stop explaining yourself. You stop starting from zero.
Every session you run without your context profile is a session where Claude fills the gaps with defaults. You set this up once. Every session after that starts with Claude already knowing you.
Get the Interview KitCal Hyslop has been teaching professionals for over 20 years. He has 36,000+ students on Skillshare and teaches at a top 3 university in South Korea. He built and deployed real AI tools in a live university classroom, before he was sure they would work. The Interview Kit is the thing he built for himself first.
"The interview process was thorough, and the resulting file gave Claude a much deeper understanding of me, my businesses, and how I think and communicate. ... It saved me a tremendous amount of time compared to trying to build something similar from scratch. I've been impressed enough that I'll be implementing it across our team."
- Matthew Powell
"The most valuable part was how it forced a level of clarity on role-specific deliverables that typical job descriptions often lack. I've already moved the document into my CLAUDE.md file to start using it as my primary context."
- R.T., CEO
"Your interview wasn't a fire hose. It was water from a natural spring you weren't expecting on your day hike. You have to bend down and sip it. You couldn't dip your water bottle in it and be on your way. Answering your interview questions takes work, but it's a force-multiplier if you want to get value out of AI."
- Steve
"I'm not a technical person, but Cal's videos and his interview AI gave me the confidence to get started with Claude Cowork. I followed his advice and asked Claude to identify my first three priorities. It took a real weight off my shoulders."
- Shar Henderson, MD and Account Manager, Cultures at Work
Does this sound familiar?
You've tried Claude or ChatGPT, and it still doesn't quite do what you need.
You got something usable once. You can't explain why it worked, so you can't count on it again.
You don't know if the problem is you, the prompt, or the tool.
You picked up another AI tip this week and still don't know what to do differently on Monday.
Most AI advice treats setup as the hard part. Download the app. Write a better prompt. Try a different tool. But if you have already done all of that, and AI still keeps letting you down, setup was never the issue.
The real problem is context. Claude does not know who you are. It does not know how you work, what you need, or what a good answer looks like for your specific job. So every conversation starts from zero. You explain yourself. You get a generic response. You adjust, you get something usable, you come back the next day and start over.
That is the cold start problem. And it does not fix itself. Not until you fix it.
And the stakes are real. You're likely paying $240 to $2,400 a year for Claude. The work you run through it is worth far more: client relationships, proposals, and decisions with thousands of dollars on the line.
When Claude doesn't know you, every one of those answers is built on a guess. A CLAUDE.md file is how you make sure it isn't.
The Professional AI Interview Kit is a structured interview agent: a system prompt that turns Claude into a professional interviewer. It asks you about how you actually work: your daily rhythms, the decisions you make repeatedly, where your time goes, the vocabulary and concepts that shape how you think in your field, how you reason through difficult decisions, where AI has already let you down, and what you actually want it to handle.
Before it asks you a single question, it reads whatever professional context already exists in your workspace: documents, notes, work samples, anything you have saved. It uses that to come in already knowing something. The questions it asks are sharper because it has already done its homework. Through follow-up questions and a structured sequence, it surfaces professional knowledge you carry but have never had to articulate, and some things you would never have thought to mention.
At the end of the conversation, it produces a Personal Operating Document: a profile of you as a professional, written in a format Claude can use directly. Save it once. From that point on, Claude knows who it is talking to every time you open a session. You do not explain your role. You do not re-establish your communication style. You do not start from zero. It already knows.
A guided interview that pulls out what you know about your work but have never had to write down. Plan for about an hour. It covers ten areas, including how you make hard decisions, how you write, and the standards of your field, so Claude stops suggesting moves you would never make and your drafts need less rewriting before they go out with your name on them.
Step-by-step instructions written separately for Claude Cowork and for claude.ai on the web. If you can save a file, you can set this up. A troubleshooting section answers the setup questions buyers ask most.
A 10-minute walkthrough where I set it up on screen, start the interview, and show you exactly what to do with your Personal Operating Document when it's finished. You never have to wonder whether you did it right.
Download and save the file. Cowork users save it as CLAUDE.md in their workspace folder. Web users paste it into a new Claude Project. Either way, setup takes under five minutes and you will not need to do it again.
Run the interview. The agent introduces itself and begins. It asks one question at a time, follows up when it needs more depth, and moves through ten areas of your professional life. Plan for about an hour. Do not rush it. The quality of what comes out depends on what you put in.
Save your Personal Operating Document. When the interview is complete, Claude produces your document. Replace the interview prompt with it in the same location. From that point on, every session starts with Claude already knowing your context, permanently, silently, in the background.
I am a university professor who has spent over 20 years figuring out how people actually learn complex things. I have 36,000+ students on Skillshare and teach at a top 3 university in South Korea. I am not a developer. I came to AI the same way most professionals do: impressed at first, then steadily frustrated when it kept not quite delivering.
So I did what everyone tells you to do. I rewrote my prompts. I tried a different tool when one let me down. Neither one fixed it, because neither one was the actual problem. Claude did not need a better instruction from me. It needed to know who I was. Once I saw that, everything changed. I built real AI tools for my own classroom before I was sure they would work. My grading automation runs on live students. I deployed it on a 2-day turnaround promise and figured out the problems as they came up. The Interview Kit came out of that same realization. Not theory. Not a framework I read about. Something I actually needed.
The most common thing I hear from professionals who have tried AI is: “I’ve downloaded it. Now what?” The interview is the answer I wish I’d had at the beginning. Not a prompt tip. Not another tool to learn. The foundational work that makes everything else actually work.
One conversation, about an hour. After that, Claude reads your profile before every session and works with you like a colleague who already knows your work. Set up in under five minutes, in Claude Cowork or claude.ai on the web.
You already pay $20 to $200 a month for Claude. The kit is $67, one time, and every month after that starts with Claude knowing you. Immediate download. No subscription.
The details that matter most are the ones you'd never think to write down. That's what the interview is for.
Get the Interview Kit for $67Questions before or after you buy? Email itsme@calhyslop.com