Every "clarify your prompt" tool asks you questions.

The standard move when you're stuck on a prompt is to have the model interview you. "Ask me clarifying questions before you answer." It's good advice right up until you're genuinely early on something, and then it fails, because the questions are all versions of "what do you want?" — which is the thing you came in not knowing. I think that's the actual gap in prompting advice. "Be specific, give context, state your constraints" is correct and slightly circular: specificity isn't a writing skill, it's what you have left over once you've thought something through. If you could list your constraints, you'd be done. So I've been working the other way round: don't articulate, react. WHY REACTION AND NOT INTERROGATION Recognition is much cheaper than production. You can't summon the right word on demand, but you know it instantly when it goes past — same reason multiple choice is easier than an essay. Interrogation asks you to produce. Reaction asks you to recognise. Only one of those is available when you're stuck. THE LOOP, AND WHY EACH INSTRUCTION IS SHAPED THAT WAY Round 1: I'm trying to think through [THING] but can't articulate it properly yet. Don't ask me clarifying questions. Give me 20 single words or short phrases that come at this from different angles: some obvious, some oblique, a few from unrelated fields. Number them. Don't explain them. "Don't ask me clarifying questions" is load-bearing. Left alone the model defaults to interviewing, and you'll answer with the same vague material you started with, which it will then faithfully reflect back. "Don't explain them" matters more than it looks. An explained word is a word you evaluate on the model's reasoning instead of your own reaction. You want the reaction uncontaminated. Round 2, twice: Kept: 3, 7, 12 These pulled at me but I don't know why yet: 4, 18 Dropped the rest. Give me 20 more, chase 4 and 18 hardest. Two buckets, not one. "Kept" is agreement. "Pulled at me" is the interesting signal and it should get the heavier weight, because it marks the direction you haven't consciously chosen yet. Don't justify any of it — justification is where you talk yourself back to the obvious. Round 3: Now write ONE self-contained prompt for what I'm actually after, built from what I kept and what pulled at me. Weight the ones that pulled hardest. Where I kept two things in tension, pose it as an open question rather than resolving it. Don't list my words back to me — find the through-line. End with a clear ask. "Don't list my words back" is the difference between a brief and a word salad. "Pose the tension as an open question" stops it flattening the thing you hadn't decided yet into a decision you didn't make. SOME EVIDENCE THAT THE REACTIONS ARE REAL WORK I built this into a tool, so I have instrumented data rather than vibes. 1,450 word-reactions from 26 people. Median time to decide, by verb: keep 47% 1.60s drop 34% 1.89s "pulls at me" 14% 2.13s "don't know the word" 4% 2.24s That ordering is the part I'd point at. If reacting were just sorting, the times would be flat. They're not, and they're monotonic: agreement is instant, rejection costs more, and the unresolved pull costs most of any real decision. People deliberate hardest over the thing they can't yet justify — which is exactly the signal you want steering round two. Sessions also decay. Keep-rate by round: 55% / 49% / 47% / 45% / 31%. The easy material runs out and your standards rise as your keeps accumulate. Practical read: three rounds is about right, and a fourth is usually you scraping. I'd call that directional, not solid — round 6 bounces back up on too few cards to trust, and I'm not going to pretend the tail is clean. LIMITS 26 people isn't a study. Different reaction times per verb is evidence the three responses do different cognitive work; it isn't proof of anything about creativity, and I'd push back on anyone who read it that way. Disclosure: the loop above is the whole method and it works fine pasted into any assistant. I also built it as a tool because doing it by hand gets tedious by round three, and that's where the numbers came from. Free, no signup. → https://www.ideastew.com Longer argument: https://www.ideastew.com/how-it-works Genuinely curious whether anyone here has a reaction-based technique rather than an interrogation-based one. Everything I've come across in this space asks questions, and I think that's a blind spot rather than a preference. submitted by /u/UniversityIll2916 [link] [comments]