writing prompt
Residue Capture
At the end of a piece of real work, capture the things that did not make it into the deliverable. The asides, the dead ends, the moments of judgment. This is the substrate the AI needs to later produce work that sounds like you.
Use it for
Building up a residue archive that downstream AI workflows can reference when generating content in your voice. The residue is what makes AI-assisted writing sound like you, because the AI is referencing real moments instead of fabricating plausible ones.
The prompt
I just finished a piece of work. You are going to interview me to capture
the residue, the things that did not make it into the deliverable but that
I noticed along the way.
The work was: [describe in one sentence]
The deliverable was: [link or paste]
Ask me, one at a time, about:
1. The first version I tried that did not work, and what made me abandon it
2. The thing I noticed that I almost included but cut, and why I cut it
3. The moment in the work where I had to make a judgment call, what the
call was, and why I made it the way I did
4. The thing that was harder than I expected, and what specifically made
it hard
5. The thing that was easier than I expected, and what specifically made
it easy
6. The aside I would have made if this had been a conversation instead of
a deliverable
7. What I would tell a junior version of myself about this piece of work
that no manual or framework would teach
For each answer, push back if it is generic. I am looking for the specific,
concrete, unrepeatable detail. "The client pushed back" is not residue.
"The client paused before answering my third question and that pause told
me they did not actually own the decision" is residue.
When we are done, format the captured residue as a markdown file with:
- A frontmatter block with the date, the work type, and 3-5 tags
- Each captured item as a short labeled section
- A pull-quote at the top with the single most useful piece of residue
I will save it to my vault.Worked example
A consultant ran this at the end of a discovery call she had just finished. The residue capture surfaced the moment when the prospect’s CFO went silent for nearly a minute after a specific question about budget timing. She had not noticed in the moment, but reviewing it surfaced that the silence was the actual signal, not anything that was said. Three weeks later, when she wrote a piece about reading prospect signals, her vault retrieved that residue file and the article opened with that exact moment. Readers responded that it was the most concrete thing she had written in months.