Templates / 'Ask before you act' variants for personal assistants
'Ask before you act' variants for personal assistants
Five ready-made rule sets (email, calendar, shopping and booking, accounts, social media) plus strict and light modes, extending the basic 'ask before you act' prompt.
Who it is for
People giving an AI assistant or agent access to email, calendars, accounts or the web, who want tighter rules than a single generic prompt.
How to use it
- Pick the variant that matches what your assistant can touch. Add more than one if it touches several things.
- Paste it into the assistant's instructions, after your normal instructions.
- Choose strict mode while you are testing and light mode only once you trust the setup.
- Also restrict the assistant's real permissions. Rules in a prompt are not a lock.
The template
Free with your name and email. Enter them to show the full template text and a worked example on this page. It costs nothing.
How this works: the template text is not in this page. It is stored on our server and sent to you after you submit the form. We do not verify your email, so this is a soft gate that runs on trust. Your name and email are saved to the BotPickr email list. See the Privacy Policy.
Your template
Example
An illustrative example written by BotPickr for a fictional business. It is not a real model run, so your own output will differ.
Example input
Example output
Guardrails and human approval
- A prompt cannot stop an agent that has the access to act. Limit its permissions too (read-only scopes, no payment methods, approval steps in the tool).
- Instructions hidden in emails or web pages can try to override your rules. The last line of the template tells the assistant to refuse these, but it is not a guarantee.
- Start strict and loosen slowly.
- Review what your assistant did regularly.
These are practical notes, not legal advice. Templates are provided as is. See section 4 of the Terms.
Works with
- ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and other assistants with connectors or agent features: Paste into the custom instructions or project instructions. Check what the assistant can actually do in your plan, and turn off access it does not need.
- n8n, Zapier, Make: Put the rules in the AI step's system message and add a real approval step (for example a manual confirmation or a message to yourself) before any send, post or payment action.
We have not benchmarked output quality across models. Output varies by model and by what you paste in, so read it before you use it.
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