Orientation

You know the desk procedures memo a new associate gets in their first week. Who does what, in what order, what to escalate, what the output is supposed to look like.

A system prompt is that memo, written for an assistant with three differences from a new associate:

It has no memory of yesterday. Every task starts from the memo alone.

It will not ask a follow-up unless you tell it that it may. Left with an ambiguity, it picks something plausible and carries on, confidently.

It reads literally. "Be thorough" is not an instruction to it, because there is nothing in the sentence that tells it what to do differently.

That is the whole discipline. You are writing procedures for a very fast, very literal colleague who forgets everything overnight and will never admit to being unsure unless you have said they can be.

Nothing in this course requires you to write code.

Token. Roughly three quarters of a word. The unit everything is measured and billed in. "Return a JSON object" is about five tokens. Length limits in this course are stated in tokens, and the editor counts them for you as you type.

Context window. Everything the assistant can see at once — your memo, the conversation so far, and any documents that have been pulled in. It is finite, like a desk. Everything you put on it takes space, and past a point, adding more makes it harder to find anything.

Tool. Something the assistant can call rather than do itself. A lookup, a search, a calculator. You write the description of each one, and that description is how it decides which to reach for.

Retrieval. Fetching the relevant documents before answering, so it works from the filing rather than from memory. When it goes wrong, you get a real figure from the wrong company's filing — which is the specific failure module 6 is about.

The full glossary is in the reference panel. You do not need to memorise any of it; it is there for when a word turns up and you would rather not guess.

Here is a real before and after, so you have seen the moves before being asked to make them. The task: an assistant that reviews account reconciliations.

Before.

You are an experienced accounting professional. Please carefully review the reconciliation and let the user know about anything that looks unusual or concerning. Be thorough in your analysis and make sure to flag important items. Use your best judgement on materiality.

Read it as your very literal colleague would. What do you actually do first? What counts as unusual? How unusual is unusual enough? What are you handing back — a paragraph, a list, a table?

None of that is in there. So it gets decided fresh, differently, every time you run it.

After.

Review an account reconciliation and report unexplained differences.

For each reconciling item, check that it has a description, an amount, and a supporting reference. Report any item missing one of those, and any item older than 60 days.

Return a table with columns: item, amount, age in days, what is missing. If every item is complete and the reconciliation balances, say so and return an empty table.

Three moves, and you will make all three repeatedly in this course.

"Anything unusual" became a list of things to check. Not because the list is exhaustive — it is not — but because a stated check can be performed and an unstated one cannot.

"Use your best judgement on materiality" became "older than 60 days." The hedge was a decision the writer declined to make, so the assistant made it instead, differently each time. Sixty may be the wrong number. A wrong number is fixable; an absent one is not.

The output got a shape. Named columns, and — this is the part people miss — an explicit answer for the case where there is nothing to report. Without that last sentence, a format demanding a table quietly pressures the assistant to find something to put in it.

Notice what the after does not do: it does not say "if the item is a deposit in transit then… but if it is an outstanding check then…". Listing every case is the opposite failure, and module 2 is about telling the two apart.