Diagnosing a Bad Response
The response comes back wrong, and the usual reaction is a vague feeling of "that's not it" followed by a vaguer fix. Reword something, run it again, hope.But bad is not one problem. A response can fail in several completely distinct ways, and each one has a different cause and a different lever. The fix for "it made up a fact" is nothing like the fix for "it gave me an essay when I wanted a list," which is nothing like the fix for "it answered the wrong question." Reword-and-retry only works when you happen to fix the right thing by luck.This free guide is the decision tree I run instead. Seven kinds of wrong, in order, with the specific lever for each. The first yes is your diagnosis, and everything below it is a distraction.It also includes the failure I lived at full scale. For weeks my own system kept trying to market something and build that same thing at once, and I kept filing it under "the agents are being weird today." They were not being weird. I had given them one name for two different things, and I had never said so out loud. The scale does not change the shape: a one-line prompt and a whole agent system fail the same way, and get fixed by the same move.Inside:- Why "it's bad" is a feeling, not a diagnosis, and what to name instead.- The seven-item decision tree: wrong question, wrong shape, wrong length, too generic, unwanted extras, confidently wrong, broken reasoning.- The exact lever for each, so your next message targets the actual gap.- A worked diagnosis, start to finish, on a real prompt and on a real system.- The correction habit I use when output comes back poor, including the one step most people skip.- Item zero, which is not on the tree, because it is not about the response at all.- Door 1: the beginner version, name the failure in one phrase before you retry.- Door 2: diagnosis as a fast reflex, and how to fix compound failures in one pass.Written from my own work, with the honest ceiling included. Getting clear does not stop bad responses. It moves where they come from, and it makes them solvable instead of mysterious.Most of the failures in here start at the ask. If you want to stop diagnosing so many of them, the RISEN prompt skill turns a brain dump into a real prompt: role, instructions, steps, end goal, and the narrowing that keeps it from wandering. On Gumroad: https://tristateaiconsulting.gumroad.com/l/risenprompt
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