The one-page AI Bible

Chapter 4 of The AI Manager ends its section on the six-line brief with a promise. Keep your briefs in one document and within a month you'll have eight of them, one for each thing you do regularly, and you'll have quietly built the most valuable file on your computer.

For a business owner that file has a name. It's your AI Bible, and it fits on a page.

The three parts

About my business. Six lines in your own words. Who you are and what you do. Who your customers are. What you want most this year. What you sell and roughly what it costs. The tools you already use. Your hours, and when you're not to be disturbed.

House rules. How you want things done, every time. Write as me, short sentences, no exclamation marks. Always show me a draft before anything is sent, posted or paid. Never offer a discount without asking. Prices, dates and names come from my files, never guessed. If you don't know, ask.

The jobs. One heading per job you'd hand to a good assistant. Reply to an enquiry. Chase a late invoice. Write this week's posts. Sort my inbox. Plan my week. Check this document before I sign it. Under each heading, the steps, in your order, with the thing to show you before it goes.

That's the page. The blank one is in the desk kit, and the business lessons at theaimanager.ai/business fill it in for you as you go.

Why one page beats a hundred prompts

Most people keep their best prompts in their head, or in a chat window they can't find again. Every new tool starts from nothing. Every new job starts from nothing. The Bible means it never does.

It also means the rules get written down where you can argue with them. Chapter 12 gives three moves to make on anything a machine hands you: what can I accept, what am I unsure of, what has nobody thought of. A Bible is where the answers to those questions go to live. The first time a draft comes back too formal, that's a house rule. The first time it offers a discount, that's a house rule. The page grows by one line each time something surprises you, and within a month it stops surprising you.

The line that does the most work

If you write only one house rule, write the one about bad. Chapter 4 says the line everyone skips in a brief is what bad looks like, and it does more work than the line about what's good, because a boundary can be checked and an aspiration can't.

So say it plainly. Bad is a figure that didn't come from my files. Bad is a message that sounds like a company. Bad is anything sent before I've seen it. Those three lines will save you more embarrassment than the rest of the page put together.

Keep it honest

A Bible isn't a policy — nobody reads a policy. It's the page you'd hand a new person on their first morning, and it should read like you wrote it on a Tuesday, because you did.

Keep the jobs to the ones you actually give. A heading for a job you've never asked for is a wish, not an instruction. Keep the rules to the ones you'd notice if they were broken. And keep it to a page, because a page gets read before every job and ten pages get skimmed once.

The part I won't pretend about

The Bible decays. Your prices change, a customer type arrives you hadn't thought of, you stop doing the thing that one job was for. Chapter 13 says a checklist nobody has questioned in two years is an outdated opinion applied with great consistency, and a Bible is a checklist.

So put a date at the top and read it every quarter, the whole page, out loud if that's what it takes. Cross out the job you no longer give. Add the rule you've been saying in your head. The page that was true in January is a trap by October if you let it be.

From chapter 4 of The AI Manager, Instructions Are the Answer, and chapter 12, Nothing Will Remind You to Think. Free to read.