Bring your own material: Same Skills, Any Assistant

Bring your own material

Reading6 min

An assistant without your material guesses. Give it the page, the spreadsheet or the transcript, and it works from what's true for you.

The habit

Attach the files the answer depends on, and say in the ask to use them: "using only the attached survey". Then check that it did.

Side by side

Claude: attach files in the chat, or add them to a Project's knowledge so every chat in it can use them.
ChatGPT: add files to a chat, or to a project's Sources so all its chats share them. In the desktop app, a local project can attach a folder on your computer.
Grok: use the + next to the message box. xAI's FAQ says most files can be up to 150 MB.
Cursor: your open folder is the material. Mention a file with @ to point the agent at it, and list anything it should never read in .cursorignore.

Checked against each vendor's docs on 2026-10-14: Claude uploads, ChatGPT projects, Grok FAQ, Cursor ignore file.

Try these prompts

I've attached our pricing page and last month's member survey. Using only these two files, list the three questions members ask most and where the page fails to answer them.Open in ChatGPT (new tab)Open in Claude (new tab)
Tell me which parts of your last answer came from the files I gave you and which came from general knowledge.Open in ChatGPT (new tab)Open in Claude (new tab)