The CRIT method

Four steps that turn a vague ask into a brief your assistant can act on, and why the third step is the one people skip.

You will be able to brief your assistant in four steps so the first draft lands close, and know when a one-line ask is enough.

Most disappointing answers come from a one-line ask that a person would also have struggled with. "Write to the supplier" is not a brief; it is a hope. CRIT is a way of briefing that takes about a minute longer than the hope and gets you a first draft you can send after two edits. It is Geoff Woods's framing, from his book The AI-Driven Leader, and the full credit is in where these ideas come from.

The four letters are context, role, interview, task. The order matters less than the habit of covering all four.

Context: what it needs#

Start with what a good assistant would need to know before doing the job. Who is involved, what has happened, what is at stake, what has already been tried. On a mineral a lot of this is already in the brain, which is the point of the interview, so the context step is often one line pointing at a page rather than a paragraph retyping it:

Read the page on Northside Sports Supplies before you start.

If the brain does not have the page, that is worth noticing. Say what it needs to know now, and afterwards ask it to write the page, so the next brief starts from there. Grow the brain is that habit.

Role: who it should be#

Tell it what seat to sit in. The same facts produce different drafts from an operations manager and from a friend who happens to know the trade. A role is one sentence: "You are the practice manager writing on the owner's behalf." "You are a plain-spoken accountant explaining this to a client who finds numbers stressful." The role sets the register before a word of the task is read.

Interview: let it ask you#

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that does the most work. Instead of guessing what you have left out, ask the assistant to ask you.

Before you draft anything, interview me. Ask one question at a time
about whatever you would need to know to do this well. Wait for
each answer. Stop when you have enough, and tell me you have.

Three or four questions later, the brief has the detail you would never have thought to type: that the supplier was late last quarter too, that the practice has a second supplier it could switch to, that the owner would rather keep the relationship than win the argument. The assistant knew to ask because the questions came from the gaps in its own picture, not yours.

The interview-me prompt is Nate Herk's, credited in where these ideas come from. The onboarding interview your mineral runs when you type /onboard is the same step at the scale of a whole brain: one question at a time, resumable, following the thread you opened rather than a checklist. The interview describes what it asks about.

Task: what you want back#

Only now the ask itself, made concrete. What form (an email, a list, a page in the brain), how long, what it must include, what it must leave out, and what "done" looks like. "Draft the email, under 150 words, name the date we need, offer the smaller order as a fallback, and do not mention the second supplier." The assistant drafts; sending is yours, always.

A worked example#

A physio clinic's supplier of treatment-table consumables has missed a delivery for the second month running. The practice manager opens the Terminal and types, in one go:

Context: read the page on Northside Sports Supplies. They missed
the August order and now the September one; we are down to a week
of stock. We have used them for six years and the owner likes them.

Role: you are our practice manager, writing for the owner.

Interview: before drafting, ask me one question at a time about
anything you need. Stop when you have enough.

Task: then draft an email under 150 words asking for a firm
delivery date by Friday, mentioning we may need to split the order
elsewhere if it slips again. Warm, not threatening.

The assistant asks three questions: whether there is a named contact, whether the owner would accept a partial delivery, and whether price has been raised in the past year. Then it drafts. The manager edits one sentence, copies it into her mail and sends it. Then she says "capture what you learned about Northside", and the supplier's page gains three lines the next brief can use.

label the four parts when you first start, exactly as above. After a few weeks you will stop needing the labels and simply write the brief in that order; the shape will have become how you ask.

When to skip it#

Not every ask is a brief. Use CRIT when the answer will go somewhere (a client, a supplier, a decision) or when the job has more than one reasonable way to do it. Skip it when:

• the brain already holds the context and the register: "reply to Jo about Thursday, keep it short" is a complete ask once Jo has a page
• you are asking a question, not commissioning work: "who am I waiting on?"
• it is a built-in skill with its own brief already inside it: /daily, /followup, /weekly need no preamble

The richer the brain, the shorter your briefs get, because the context step is increasingly "read the page". That is why the interview is worth the hour, and why the habits in prompting habits lean towards saying less as the months go on.

Turn a good brief into a skill#

If you find yourself typing the same CRIT brief every week, it is no longer a brief: it is a recipe. Ask the assistant to save it as a skill of your own, and from then on it is a single command in the Terminal, schedulable like any built-in. Write your own skill is the how-to, and starter recipes has a dozen to begin with.