The Gauntlet

Hyperstitional rhetorical situations · run your idea through the rows

Pick the kind of thing you want to test. Describe it to an AI in your own chat. Then send it down the lane — the friendly row writes the documents of a world where it worked, the adversarial row writes the ones that test whether it should exist. Each prompt produces one text that treats your idea as real.

How to use

1. Open a chat with your AI of choice and describe your idea in a few sentences. That's enough — every prompt invents a representative persona and plausible details for anything you don't supply. Share personal details only if you want them used.

2. Copy prompts from the rows below and paste them one at a time. Read what comes back before choosing the next.

3. One world or many: running the whole gauntlet in a single chat builds one coherent timeline — names and details carry over. Running each prompt in a fresh chat gives independent versions instead, and any detail that recurs across separate chats is a genuine signal about your idea, not a leftover. Both modes are useful; they answer different questions.

4. Phases: early prompts probe the idea while it can still change, mid prompts test it in motion, late prompts examine its afterlife. Weight is a rough size of the text you'll get back.

The prompt library couldn't load. This page parses its built-in YAML with a small library fetched from the internet (cdnjs). If you're offline, reconnect once and reload — or open the file's source and read the prompts directly inside the <script type="text/yaml"> block. Everything is in there.