Give it your reality.

You ask for advice and get the kind printed on office posters: communicate openly, know your worth, do your research. It is advice for everyone, which makes it advice for nobody in particular.

The assistant isn’t being lazy. It knows an enormous amount about raises in general and nothing about yours. Reality is the R in DREAM: your actual situation, in your own words. Who you are, the facts, the limits, what you already tried and why it matters now. The prompting guides from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft differ on details, but all four ask for context. It is what turns general advice into advice for you.

A good test is the smart friend who has never met you. Would they have enough to go on? If their honest first reply would be “well, it depends,” you have left out the part it depends on.

Paste the real thing

If your question is about an email, a lease, a letter or a spreadsheet, don’t describe it. Paste it. Your summary of the landlord’s email is a rumor. The email is evidence. Anthropic’s prompting guide adds a detail worth borrowing: put long material first and your question after it. It says that in tests, asking at the end improved the quality of answers by up to 30 percent, most of all when the material was several long documents.

Share what is needed, not everything. Names, account numbers, ID numbers and other people’s private details can stay out, and the answer will rarely be worse for it.

Typing your life story into every chat gets old by Wednesday, so write it once. An “about me” card is a short paragraph on your work, your goals, your limits and how you like answers written. Paste it at the top of any chat, in any app. Some assistants now remember things about you between chats, but that memory is partial and works differently in each app. A card you wrote yourself is the same everywhere, and you know exactly what is on it. This lesson’s exercise builds one.

Side by side

The weak version could have been typed by anyone with a boss. The strong version could only have come from one person: four years in, $58,000, payroll added in January, a boss who hates surprises, a slow spring. Each fact changes the advice. The slow spring changes the timing. The extra duties become the opening argument. “I’ve never negotiated anything” changes the tone of the script. It also asks the assistant to flag what it is assuming about local pay, because that is the one thing a pasted paragraph can’t settle.

Facts tell the assistant what is true. They don’t tell it what you would call good. For that you have to show it something, which is lesson four.