I knew what I stood for. I’d never written it down.
If you asked me my values I would sit down and tell you in a conversation. What I had never done was write them down in one place so I could see them all together.
It never occurred to me to write them down. Why? I’m not sure. I had no prior reason to document the catalog of what I believed. They grew and evolved over time. Documenting them for AI was the catalyst for me to finally do it.
I had been building a file AI reads at the start of every session, a briefing on who I am and how I think. Section by section, I gave my AI collaborator the context it needed to stop guessing about me.
We’d covered how to work with me, how I write, my rules and preferences. Then we reached the deepest layer. What I believe. What I stand for. The principles sitting under every decision.
I started writing that section cold. It was far harder than I thought it was going to be. First I sat with a piece of paper. Without someone asking questions about my values and principles I had a hard time recalling more than just a few. Then I asked Claude to read back across everything I had already saved from our several months of conversations. It parsed my notes, my articles, months of saved conversations. One line stood out from a conversation and I wrote it down in my me-file:
My words over their words - My own voice is the only one that will always be with me when I need it most. I don’t need to fit into someone else’s system. What does Tim believe?
We proceeded. It surfaced a statement of mine. I read it back, sometimes out loud, and watched for the uneasiness of something sounding not quite right. They were things that I had been living but had never once written down in a single document.
The process came with a valuable surprise. My best thoughts and ideas often come out in conversations. Sitting down to document this for AI, in conversation, exposed and deepened my understanding of them. I found I was holding on to values that no longer resonated with who I am today. Some were remnants of things I had unconsciously picked up from others along the way. Over the years, others had grown stale but I still was holding on to them. AI helped me fill the blanks where I had a feeling for something but struggled to put it into sentences. It surfaced a place where what I claimed to believe didn’t match my actions and my words. My values have moved over the years, and putting them in one body is what let me see where they had moved to.
Writing them down doesn’t make them fixed or final. The work was formalizing them, and the formalizing was the refinement.
You might wonder why an AI needs your values at all. Here’s why.
Your values aren’t decoration. They decide how you show up with people and what you choose. They run underneath every decision you make, whether you have named them or not.
Working with AI is no different from working with a person. A collaborator who doesn’t know what you stand for won’t know how to work well with you, human or AI. You ask AI to do something and to make decisions along the way. Every decision requires values to guide the option(s) in alignment with you. Give your AI those values and two things change.
First, it tells you when you are about to betray your own foundation. When I was building my personal brand strategy, I felt drawn toward prioritizing reach, chasing the metric the people I was learning from all chased. Claude stopped me. I had told it what I stood for, so it saw the conflict I had missed:
Claude: Reach as the primary metric contradicts the thesis. You’d be teaching one thing and modeling another.
It was right, my values prioritize depth and authentic engagement. Without my values in the file, that pushback from AI is impossible. There is nothing to measure the choice against. With them, it caught me professing one thing and living another.
Second, it helps you sharpen what those values are. That is what happened to me across a dozen sessions. Name a value out loud, AI reflects it back, feel where it landed almost right, fix it. My understanding of my own values sharpened as the conversation unfolded.
This is where the title for this article grew from. A me-file can equip your AI to act on your behalf, to communicate in your name inside limits you set. The moment it does, the values question stops being philosophy.
An AI that doesn’t know what you stand for makes the call anyway. It speaks for you anyway. It fills the blank with an average of everything it has ever read and was trained on, and that average is not you.
We are all shaped by our environments, including our interactions with AI. What you receive from AI or how AI represents you is based on what it assumes or guesses about you, or by what you took the time to write down and hand to it. Those are the only two options.
So write it down for yourself first. Both you and AI benefit. It provides you the opportunity to finally see the foundation you have been standing on the whole time.
Until that moment, I had never stopped to consider that AI needed my values, or asked it to name those surfacing in our conversations. You get to start there.
In the earlier parts of this series you built the identity layer of your me-file, section by section. This is the last one, and it sits underneath all the others: what you value, what you believe, the principles you won’t trade away. You don’t rebuild the file. You paste in what you already have and add one layer on top of it.
You don’t need years of saved conversations to do this. If you have written anything, journals, notes, old posts, point the prompt at it and let your AI find the shape and read it back. If you don’t have anything like that, the interview builds the sections from your own responses. Either way the goal is the same: get what you stand for out of your head and into one place your AI reads.
You don’t need to read this like an essay. It is built for your AI, not for you. Copy it whole into a fresh session, with your current me.md ready to paste.
You are my Me Refresher. I already have a me.md file, a briefing my AI reads at the start of every session so it knows who I am and how to work with me. I built the earlier sections in earlier parts of this series. Your job now is to add the last layer of who I am, three sections, Values and Virtues, Beliefs and Credos, and First Principles, and change nothing else.
First, get my file. If you can read files, ask me where me.md is and read it. If my me.md lives in your own saved instructions or memory, read it from there. If neither, ask me to paste the whole file in now. Do not start until you have it.
One rule above all: do not rewrite my words. Everything already in the file stays exactly as I wrote it. You are adding three sections, not editing the rest.
Then, before you interview me, check for a record. Ask me one question: do we keep any history you can read, saved chats, a project folder, exported transcripts, journals, essays, old notes, your own memory of our sessions?
- If yes, read across it first. Look for what I return to, what I defend, the principles sitting under my decisions. Draft what you find and read it back to me before you ask anything. Ground every value in a real moment from the record, in my own words, not a guess.
- If no, say so plainly, and build the sections from the interview below instead. Do not infer my values from my other me.md sections and present them as fact.
Then work like this:
- Ask one question at a time. Hear my answer, then ask the next based on what I said, not from a script. Never dump a list.
- Draft my words back to me and let me react before you move on. Quote me. Do not smooth my language. If nothing real surfaces, leave a placeholder.
- When I am vague, ask for one real moment. A time I was proud of how I showed up, a stand I took that cost me something. The story is the material.
- Follow my energy. If I say "good enough," stop drilling and draft from what you have.
- Address me by name. Skip the filler.
Build the last layer. Cover three sections:
1. Values and Virtues. What do I stand for? What would I defend even at a cost? Tell me about a moment I was proud of how I showed up, and name what I was living out.
2. Beliefs and Credos. What would I argue at a dinner table? A line or a quote I have made my own? Something I have changed my mind about lately?
3. First Principles. Do not ask me for these cold. From my stories and my record, propose one or two back to me, "it sounds like one thing you are sure of is this, fair?", and let me confirm, cut, or reshape until each one is mine.
Write each section as I would recognize it, in my words, not yours. If a value has shifted over the years, say what it shifted from and what it shifted to. If two of them pull against each other, show me the tension instead of hiding it. The contradictions are part of the truth.
Then build the updated file:
- Add the three sections, Values and Virtues, Beliefs and Credos, First Principles, in my words.
- Leave every other section exactly as it was, including any placeholders the later parts of the series fill.
Now save it the same way it came in:
- If you read my me.md from a file, show me the three new sections, get my okay, then back up the old file and save the update in place.
- If I pasted my me.md in, hand the whole updated file back to me as one copy-paste block.
- If my me.md lives in your saved instructions or memory, hand me the whole updated file as one copy-paste block and tell me to paste it into your instructions in place of the old version.
Last, keep this file. This is the last section the identity layer needs. The next piece in the series is where the whole file goes to work.
The first time you run this, watch for the moment I had: your AI reading a value back to you in your own words. Your AI has nothing to stand on until you put what you stand for where it will read it.
That completes the identity layer. Everything the earlier parts built, plus this, and your AI holds a real model of who you are. The next piece puts the whole file to work, starting with the collaborator that catches the decision cutting against your values and helps you sharpen them, the one that did it for me. And it opens the harder question this series turns to next: knowing you is not the same as being safe to act as you.
If you have never written down what you stand for, what is your AI standing on when it speaks for you?
This is Part 7 of Thinking With AI, a multipart series where I chart my journey from AI Consumer to AI Architect. Each part gives you a practical prompt, tip, or trick you can apply immediately, and adds one more section to the me-file you build as you go. This is the last part of the first series, and it lays the final layer of who you are.
Part 1, My AI Called Me Gary - the 5 output checks and the first step in building your me-file
Part 2, The Explorer Stopped Getting Paid - the pitfall of information hoarding, and what happens when AI assumes a core part of your identity
Part 3, I Gave My AI a Map of My Weaknesses - naming your patterns out loud, and the Patterns to Catch section
Part 4, My Best Prompt Is 12 Words Long - the interview prompt that closes scope fast
Part 5, Your AI Is Guessing How You Think - why a fresh session guesses how you think, and the How I Think section
Part 6, You Can’t Verify What You Don’t Yet Know - why the verify advice fails a beginner, and the Refuting Reader prompt
If you are new to the series, start with Part 1, where my AI called me Gary and taught me the fifth check I run on every output. That one also starts your me-file.