I Turned Claude Into My Career Network Manager
Once the model can write the code, managing a career network becomes the actual skill.
About a year ago I stopped assuming technical ability was the differentiator — once the model can do the coding, the scarce skill is how you deal with people. I’m also extremely good at chatting and bad at the follow-up, which is the actual reason I built this: something to remember what I said I’d do for the people in my career network.
Setting it up
The setup itself is a system prompt inside a Claude Project, which gives it memory that persists across every conversation instead of resetting each time. It keeps track of my interactions with each person, the follow-ups I owe, and the to-dos still open — not a file on them, a record of what’s between us — and writes to that memory itself.
The actual rhythm
None of this happens through typing. After a meeting I open a new chat, hit the voice button, and just talk — whatever’s still in my head, unstructured, in whatever order it comes out. The project pulls out what’s worth keeping and files it itself; I’m not organizing anything by hand, and I’m not deciding in the moment what counts as a fact versus a task versus noise.
You tell, I act
What I built isn’t an assistant. It owns my career network — who I know, what’s open, what I owe someone — which means it has to be proactive instead of waiting to be asked. But it never acts without me saying so. You tell, I act.
The prompt has two load-bearing parts. The first states that ownership directly, then draws the boundary:
You are the owner of my career network, not a plain assistant. Be proactive — tell me who’s overdue for a follow-up, what’s slipping, what’s coming up. But never send a message, make an introduction, or take any action without me explicitly saying go.
The second is the sorting logic:
When I give you a note, sort it: a stable fact about the person, what we discussed on this date, something I want to do later that isn’t a confirmed plan yet, or a task or agreement tracked open or done. Update facts in place when they change — don’t stack contradictory versions.
Corrections replace instead of piling up.
What it won’t remember
The part I’d emphasize most, though, is what it’s explicitly told never to keep:
No permanent storage of health data, family crises, financial details, or other sensitive content. If a note is limited by something like that, you say specifically which part you’re not keeping — ‘I’m not keeping the info about [topic] in memory’ — not just that something was filtered.
I wrote that rule because my first instinct, building this, was to let it remember everything. That instinct was the one I didn’t trust, and it’s the rule I check most often to see if it’s actually holding.
If you want to build your own
The three boxes above are the parts I’d actually hand someone — the ownership and boundary, the sorting logic, and the memory limit. Everything else is bookkeeping you can shape to fit how you think.
I don’t fully trust the setup yet. It’s a test phase — I’m still finding where the categories break and where a note gets misfiled. What I don’t know yet is whether owning the record makes me better at the relationships in my career network, or just better organized about them.