Incident File for Prompt Copy Ritual

INCIDENT FILE , Prompt Copy Ritual Classification: Recurring behavioral pattern, non-emergency Status: Active. No remediation planned.

Summary of incident. At approximately the start of the workday, the subject opened a new AI chat session. They did not begin with a question. They began by pasting a block of text they had written several weeks ago. The block explains who the subject is, what project they are working on, what tone they prefer, and what the tool should not do. The block is 340 words. It was pasted before any productive exchange occurred.

This was not the first time. It will not be the last.

Background. The subject uses an AI drafting tool regularly. The tool does not retain context between sessions. The subject does not trust the tool to infer context from a cold start. The response to this is the ritual: copy the setup, paste the setup, then begin. The ritual takes forty-five seconds. It occurs an average of six times per week.

Someone copies the same long setup prompt into new chats because they do not trust the tool to remember context. This is accurate. This is also reasonable. The incident file does not dispute the logic.

What makes it an incident. The help is useful enough to use and awkward enough to disguise. This is the central tension. The subject does not describe the tool's contribution when presenting the work. The subject performs one private manual check of any output before treating it as their own. That check has become part of the normal workflow, which means the workflow now includes a step that does not appear in the workflow documentation.

Assisted work has become routine. Disclosure remains exceptional.

The assistance is useful enough to use daily and awkward enough that nobody mentions it in the meeting where the work is discussed.

No action recommended. The ritual is stable, efficient, and entirely private. Documenting it here does not constitute disclosure. The incident file is not circulated.