Context: Tell It What Only You Know

Tessa's prompts are sharper now, but a new email stumps the model anyway. A guest is asking whether she can move her booking to September, and the model's drafted reply is polite, well-shaped — and wrong, because it invents a rebooking policy Waymark does not have. The model has read half the internet. It has never read Waymark's rebooking policy, this guest's email, or anything else that lives inside Tessa's world. This page is about the second half of every good prompt: the material only you can supply.

Recall the spine of Chapter 1: the model only knows what is in front of it — its trained patterns, plus whatever is currently in the window. That splits all knowledge into two kinds. General knowledge: enormous, public, frozen at the cutoff — how rebooking emails usually sound, what politeness looks like, how travel businesses typically work. Your situation: small, private, current — Waymark's actual policy, this guest's actual words, the actual dates in question. Good answers need both, and only you can supply the second. The word for supplying it is context, and choosing it well is the single most professional habit in this chapter.

Paste the Relevant Thing

The fix for the invented policy takes one move: paste the real one. Tessa puts the guest's email and Waymark's actual rebooking rules into her message, asks for a reply that follows the pasted policy — and the draft comes back correct, citing the fourteen-day notice period that actually exists. Pasted context beats described context every time, for a reason worth making explicit: your description of a document is your summary of it, filtered through your reading; the pasted text is the source itself. When the wording matters — policies, complaints, contracts — paste the wording.

Think of calling a knowledgeable friend for advice. They know the world; they cannot know your situation until you tell them what is going on — and reading them the actual letter beats paraphrasing it from memory. The model is that friend, with the phone call happening in the window.

Relevant, Not Everything

The temptation, once pasting clicks, is to paste everything — the whole policy handbook, the entire email thread, three years of newsletters, "so it has all the background." Resist it, for two reasons the reader already owns. The window is finite (Chapter 1), and a stuffed window pushes out exactly the things that mattered. And attention is diluted: buried in forty pages of handbook, the one relevant paragraph competes with thirty-nine irrelevant ones. The craft is choosing the paragraph that bears on this task — the rebooking section, not the handbook.

A good working question: what would a capable colleague need to see to do this task? Not everything you have — the two or three things that decide the answer. (What you must never paste, no matter how relevant — client card numbers, credentials, other people's private details — is a different question, and Chapter 6 draws that line hard. For now: relevance is the filter for usefulness; Chapter 6 adds the filter for permission.)

Label What You Paste

One more habit turns good context into professional context. When a message contains several materials — an email, a policy, some notes — unlabelled, they arrive as one undifferentiated wall, and the model can blur them into each other: treating your rough notes as official policy, or quoting the complaint as if Waymark wrote it. The fix costs five words: label each block. "Here is the guest's email:" — "Here is our rebooking policy:" — "Here are my rough notes — do not treat these as policy:".

Labels give the model the same thing numbering gave the multi-part request on the last page: visible structure to hold on to. And notice what Tessa has quietly learned to do across these two pages: state the task precisely, then supply exactly the materials it needs, each one named. That is not a beginner's trick. That is — in miniature — the discipline engineers building large systems around these models spend their days on. She is learning the real thing, at hand scale.