Out of the box, Dex is a good generalist chief of staff. The versions of Dex that people won't give up are the ones they've shaped: it speaks their language, knows their industry, runs their personal playbooks, and connects to their exact toolchain. This page is the map of every way to make that happen — from thirty-second tweaks to building your own capabilities. None of it requires programming.
Level 0 — Don't write your profile. Get interviewed for it.
The single best personalization move costs ten minutes and no configuration at all — flip the script and let Dex pull the context out of you:
I want you to interview me so you can work brilliantly with me. Ask one question at a time — never a list — and keep going until you have enough. Cover: what I actually do day to day (not my title), the goals I'm measured on, who my customers and stakeholders are, how I like to work and communicate, and what keeps going wrong. Then update my profile and my USER_EXTENSIONS block, and show me exactly what you changed.
Make it your own: answer out loud with voice dictation and don't tidy your answers — the tangents contain the truth. A full collection of moves like this lives in Prompts to steal.
Level 1 — Tune how Dex works with you
Just ask. Almost every personalization in Dex is a sentence in chat:
- "Be more direct with me — skip the encouragement."
- "I want to reconfigure my strategic pillars."
- "Stop suggesting I connect Todoist."
Behind the scenes these edit your profile (System/user-profile.yaml) — formality, directness, level of detail, coaching style — and your pillars. You can also open those files and edit them directly; they're short and readable.
Standing instructions that survive updates. Inside Dex's instruction file (CLAUDE.md) is a protected section marked USER_EXTENSIONS — anything you put there is loaded into every conversation and is never touched by updates. It's the right home for permanent rules like "always give me dates in ISO format" or "when I mention the board, I mean the advisory board."
Teach it your worldview. Two skills make Dex smarter about your context specifically:
/industry-truths— a 15-minute interview about what you believe is true in your industry now, in 6 months, in 12. Dex then grounds strategic conversations in your actual beliefs — and can revisit them later to see which predictions held./identity-snapshot— generates a profile of how you really work, from evidence in your own vault. Never asks you anything; it's a mirror, and it calibrates Dex's advice.
Level 2 — Grow into more of Dex
You start with a handful of skills; there are dozens more, including role-specific packs (product, sales, marketing, engineering…) that aren't installed until wanted.
/dex-level-upwatches what you actually use and suggests two or three next features that fit — never a firehose.- The Career room (
/career-setup) adds a genuinely differentiated capability: Dex captures evidence of your wins as they happen, then/career-coachand/resume-builderturn months of receipts into reviews, promotion cases, and resumes.
Level 3 — Add your own commands
A skill is just a text file of instructions — which means you can create your own. Can't think of what to build? Don't guess — let Dex catch a skill in the wild:
Watch how I've been working. Look at my recent daily plans, session learnings, and meeting notes: what do I do repeatedly, by hand, that follows a pattern? Propose the three best candidates to turn into skills — for each, what the command would do, what it would read, and what I'd get. Then let's build the best one together with /create-skill.
Here's what building one feels like — no code, just describing the job:
From then on it's one command every Friday. Anything you do repeatedly with more than two steps is a skill candidate.
Level 4 — Connect anything
Dex speaks MCP, the open standard for connecting AI assistants to tools, and that's an open door:
/integrate-mcp— install a ready-made connector from a marketplace of hundreds (Notion, Linear, Slack, GitHub…). Dex reads the connector's documentation, explains what it can do, and wires it in./create-mcp— when no connector exists, Dex builds one with you from the tool's API documentation, live in conversation. This is the most advanced thing in Dex, and it's still a guided interview, not a coding session. It ends with a verification step where you explicitly approve the new connection before it ever runs unattended./dex-add-mcp— for a connector you already have details for; registers it so it survives Dex updates.
The improvement loop — Dex evolves itself
The most distinctive habit to build: complain to Dex about Dex. Say "I wish Dex could…" or "it's annoying that…" mid-conversation and the idea is captured into your personal improvement backlog automatically.
/dex-backlogranks everything captured by impact and fit with how you actually use Dex./dex-improvetakes the winner and workshops it into a concrete plan — often implementable on the spot.
Friction in, capability out. Your Dex six months from now is partly built from your own complaints.
Sharing what you've built
When your customized workflow gets good, it's shareable. DexDiff turns a working setup into a methodology document others can adopt: /diff-generate packages one workflow; /diff-adopt installs someone else's, rebuilt fresh against your vault and tools by your own Dex — a spec being followed, not foreign code being run. Browse what others share at heydex.ai/diff.
Where to start
Do the thirty-second version today: tell Dex one preference about how it talks to you, and put one standing instruction in your extensions block. Next Friday, notice the workflow you repeat every week — and make it a skill.
Don't just read this — paste it into your own Dex and it becomes a lesson about your actual work.
First, fetch and read the page I'm referring to: https://heydex.ai/help/make-it-your-own.md I just read the Dex Guide's "Make Dex your own" page. Design my personalization roadmap from evidence, not aspiration: based on my usage patterns, session learnings, and what I complain about, pick the ONE profile tweak, ONE custom skill, and ONE new connection that would pay off most for me specifically — and say why, citing the evidence. Then do the profile tweak immediately and start me on the skill.