Question · Seed idea · last reconsidered August 17, 2026
What did the prompt leave out?
A variant of "what did the representation leave out?", applied specifically to prompts and generated answers.
Open question — no answer required
- Kind of question
- Epistemic · Diagnostic
About what a prompt — as a compressed representation of an intention — necessarily fails to specify, and what a generated answer therefore cannot be expected to cover.
Why it matters
A prompt is a specification written by someone who cannot state everything they know. What it omits is not random: it is precisely the part of the task the author could not have articulated if asked, which is also the part whose absence is hardest to notice in the result.
Tensions
- The omission you can name is already fixed; the one that matters is the one you would not have thought to write down.
- Longer prompts do not close the gap — they move it, since every added specification is itself written from the same partial knowledge.
Positions taken
has response
- We know more than we can tellClaim
What a prompt leaves out is, systematically, what its author could not have stated.
Questions this opens
questions
- Which abilities should remain ours?Question
What a prompt cannot carry is a first approximation of what a person still has to be able to do.
Connected ideas
is developed by
extends
- What did the representation leave out?Question
A prompt is a specific case of a representation; this question narrows the general one to that case.
questions
Paths through this question
appears in
- What a Map Cannot CarryPath
And to today's instance of it, one you are probably holding.
Explore this question in the map
Continue exploring
- WritingWhen the Answer Becomes Cheaper Than the QuestionA walk along one path through the graph, from what a prompt leaves out to the site's central question about what we no longer have to ask.
- ClaimWe know more than we can tellPolanyi's claim that skilled recognition outruns the criteria anyone can state for it.
- ConceptRepresentationA stand-in for a thing — a description, model, image, or summary — used in place of the thing itself.
- QuestionWhat did the representation leave out?A question about what is lost whenever a thing is replaced by a stand-in for it.