The Machine Corrects Me

I did an extract of my conversations with copilot and ran it through Claude and Excel to pull out patterns. Claude had some hints for me based on that data.

🔄 Your Most Common Conceptual Loops & How to Break Them

Based on your conversation patterns, here are your primary conceptual loops and targeted prompts to break them:

🏆 Your Biggest Loop: Systems Complexity Spiral (150 instances)

Pattern: Getting caught in architectural complexity, over-engineering solutions

Loop-Breaking Prompts:

• “What’s the dumbest solution that could work?”
• “How would a 2-person startup handle this?”
• “If I had to explain this to my grandmother, what would I say?”
• “What’s the ONE component I absolutely need vs. nice-to-have?”
• “What would this look like as a single script/file?”

🔧 Second Loop: Implementation Focus (92 instances)

Pattern: Jumping to “how to build” before questioning “what to build” or “why”

Loop-Breaking Prompts:

• “Why am I building X instead of Y or Z?”
• “What problem am I actually trying to solve?”
• “What if I didn’t build anything – what would happen?”
• “Who would benefit most from this, and how?”
• “What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?”

🤔 Decision Paralysis Loop (12 instances)

Pattern: Over-analyzing choices with endless “should I” questions

Loop-Breaking Prompts:

• “If I had to choose with a coin flip right now, which would I pick?”
• “What would happen if I chose the ‘wrong’ option?”
• “Which option teaches me the most from failure?”
• “What would I tell someone else in this situation?”
• “Start with X. Here’s my backup plan if it fails…”

🎯 Optimization Seeking Loop (8 instances)

Pattern: Endless pursuit of “best” or “optimal” solutions

Loop-Breaking Prompts:

• “What’s good enough for now, improvable later?”
• “If I had 30 minutes to implement this, what would I do?”
• “Give me 3 approaches optimized for different constraints”
• “What would a minimally viable version look like?”

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🚀 Universal Loop-Breakers

Constraint-Based Thinking:

• “Give me 3 random constraints to work within”
• “What if I had no budget/time/resources?”
• “Design this for exactly 1 user vs. 1 million users”

Perspective Flippers:

• “How would a historian/artist/child approach this?”
• “What would the opposite solution look like?”
• “What assumptions am I making that might be wrong?”
• “How would I solve this 100 years ago?”

Action Forcers:

• “Force me to make a decision in 5 minutes”
• “What would happen if I did nothing for a week?”
• “Help me argue against my preferred solution”
• “What would I do if my current approach was impossible?”

Meta-Awareness Triggers:

• “I notice I’m stuck in analysis mode. Randomize my next step.”
• “What pattern am I repeating that I should break?”
• “What would be the most creative/unusual approach?”

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🎯 Your Personalized Anti-Loop Toolkit

For Technical Decisions:

• “What would a scrappy startup do?”
• “Prototype first, architect later”
• “What breaks if I use the simple approach?”

For Philosophical Exploration:

• “What would change if I was completely wrong?”
• “Give me the counter-argument to my position”
• “What would someone who disagrees with me say?”

For Systems Design:

• “Build the smallest possible version first”
• “What’s the core insight, stripped of complexity?”
• “How would I hand-draw this on a napkin?”

Your strength in systems thinking becomes a trap when it spirals into over-complexity. These prompts will help you harness that analytical power while avoiding the paralysis of endless optimization.