A Nielsen Norman Group guide to keeping your homemade AI assistant setup understandable
Nielsen Norman Group researcher Tanner Kohler studied people without technical backgrounds who build their own AI assistant setups from saved instruction files and connected apps. Many of those systems grew piecemeal until their owners could not find the files they depended on. The article sorts the AI's working material into global context (rules that apply everywhere), local context (notes for one project or task) and ambient context (streams like email the AI can read). Its suggested habits include keeping those types in separate files and naming the type when you ask the AI for a change, so you stay able to steer it.
- For
- Detroit creatives and small business owners who already use AI tools such as Claude or ChatGPT with saved instructions, project files, automations or connected apps like Asana, Todoist or Google Drive, and want to keep that setup from becoming a junk drawer only the AI can navigate.
- Cost
- No price is stated for the article; the full text appeared on the provider's page without a stated paywall or sign-up. Nielsen Norman Group promotes related paid live online courses on the same page, including Context Engineering, but no course price appears in the provided material, and the article does not require them.
- Access
- Published online by Nielsen Norman Group on October 2, 2026, and listed by TLDR Design on October 12, 2026. The provided page shows no account, membership or location requirement to read it. Findings come from the provider's own user study; the number of participants is not stated. No Detroit or Michigan connection.
Your moveRead the article, then try its self-check: if you wanted your AI setup to behave differently, would you know whether to change your global instructions or a single project's notes? If not, the article suggests reading your global instructions from start to finish in one sitting and moving anything that only applies to one project into that project's own file.
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