Prisms
A drawer of instruments
Imperative prompts. Paste one, paste your draft, read what the sequence surfaces. They will not flatter the piece.
Diagnostic
Attack a claim. Find the trade-off that cannot be written away.
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claim
4 stepsForces a piece of contemplative prose to make a single falsifiable claim about experience. Strips hedging, names what would disprove the insight, exposes whether the piece rests on a genuine observation or a rehearsed one.
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conservation
5 stepsFinds the conservation law of a contemplative essay — the trade-off between naming and losing, attention and interference, that the piece cannot write its way out of. Adapted from L12.
Epistemic
Test whether a claim survives its counter-experience.
Interpretive
Read the piece against what it refuses to say.
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blindspot
3 stepsLocates what the narrator of a contemplative piece is refusing to notice. Not a flaw to fix — the blindspot is often the real subject of the piece, visible only by outline.
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sediment
4 stepsExcavates the unspoken history a contemplative piece rests on — the prior losses, readings, and experiences it assumes but never names. Adapted from archaeology.
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emergence
3 stepsIdentifies what only becomes visible in the piece once the reader stops looking at what the writer is pointing to. Reframed for contemplative reading.
Generative
The one that outputs prose. Use last, or not at all.
→ About prisms
A prism is a markdown system prompt that acts as a small cognitive program. Instead of asking a model to reason about a piece of prose, it instructs the model to construct something — a claim, a falsification, a counter-experience, a rewrite — and observe what breaks. The format carries the analytical power. The vocabulary only chooses the domain.
The upstream set was built for code. This set is built for essays that attempt to say something true about experience. The moves are the same: make a claim, attack it, find the trade-off that cannot be written away. The vocabulary has shifted from bugs and API surface to blindspots and borrowed authority.
To use one: open a prism, copy its body, paste it into a capable model, paste the essay immediately after. Read the output against the essay. The prism's job is to make the piece legible to itself, not to improve it. draft is the exception — it outputs rewritten prose rather than analysis. Use it last, or not at all.