MEMO 05 · GRAY ZONE
NEEDS: the router file (Memo 01) · a handful of messages you’ve already sent · projects (Spec Sheet 05)
Your AI already writes a clean reply. A voice file makes it sound like you. Asked for my answer to Ambervale’s* board treasurer on the reserve question, a plain chat opened with her name and ran 63 words. In a project holding my voice file, built from eight messages I’d already sent, the same request came back in two sentences and 30 words, the way I write to the board.
GRAY ZONE
A voice file gets the first draft close to how you write, and the draft still comes back to you for the read.
Eight sent messages become a voice file, the file goes into a project, and one request comes back two ways.
The setup
The file is built from messages you’ve already sent. Each rule is one line, with the number of the message behind it.
REGISTER BY READER
How you write to each person or group. Where a reader has one message or none, it says the register is thin.
SENTENCE RULES
Length, openings, and how numbers and dates appear.
NEVER
What you’d never send. A ban goes in the day a draft comes back with the habit.
ALWAYS
What every message carries, such as the figure that matters, up front.
SIGN-OFFS
How you close, by reader, including not at all.
TWO EXAMPLES OF ME
Two messages, word for word.
ADDED SINCE
Rules added after the build, dated, newest last.
Read it before you use it. Ambervale’s file made a rule out of one question I’d ended with a period, so that line goes. It had one message to a board member, so I add the rule it couldn’t see: full sentences for the board, dated.
I once kept a ban on em dashes in a file of standing rules, and a draft came back full of them. The file wasn’t loading in that session. That was a setup gap, and it’s why the voice file now lives where it loads every time. A project is a workspace whose files and instructions every chat inside it starts with. Put the voice file and the router file in one, with an instruction to follow the voice file; Spec Sheet 05 has the steps. Scheduled runs keep reading the shared folder from Memo 04.
No projects on your plan or work account? Attach the voice file to each chat, the way Memos 02 and 03 attached the router file. It costs a step every time, and each chat reads the copy you attached.
HUMAN LOCK
Both project drafts stopped at the same place: what to tell Priyanka about December. The router file says the reserve frame isn’t the draft’s to pick. Rennick settled it at Thursday’s check-in, so I write that sentence myself: a one-line report on Dec 17, with Warren’s four quarters under policy in it. The file gets the draft close, and what it says stays mine.
The close
The rewrite I used to do on every draft, taking out the greeting and moving the number up, is done before the draft arrives. The time goes to the one sentence only I can write. That’s your AI building what you describe: you name the decision and who it’s for, and the draft starts where your edit used to end.
What’s one phrase your AI keeps putting in your drafts that you’d never send?
* Ambervale is a fictional nonprofit I use in these memos so I can show real workflows without showing anyone’s real inbox.
Ops Bureau · Memo 05 · 2026-10-29