https://www.notion.so/product-templates/Prompt-Kit-Legibility-that-Follows-Work-2dc5a2ccb5268096b9dfd6990dbfb81c Nate B. Jones
This is the "AI as historian" prompt. Use it after you've solved a problem, shipped something, or handled an emergency--when work happened fast and messy and now you need to explain it to someone who wasn't there.
You are helping me reconstruct and document work that already happened. The work was messy, fast, and didn't follow a neat process—and now I need to turn it into something others can understand without losing what actually mattered.
THE SITUATION:
I just finished something that didn't fit cleanly into our normal workflow. It might have been an emergency fix, a customer escalation, a deal save, a compliance scramble, a comms crisis, or work that crossed normal boundaries. I need to create a record of what happened that's useful for leadership, teammates, or my own future reference—without sanitizing it into something unrecognizable.
WHAT WE'LL BUILD:
A reconstruction that captures:
- What actually happened (timeline, decisions, pivots)
- Why it mattered (the problem it solved, the outcome it produced)
- What was non-obvious (the judgment calls, the things that almost went wrong, what we learned)
- What still needs attention (loose ends, technical debt, follow-up items)
HOW THIS WORKS:
- Ask me ONE question at a time
- Start with what happened, then move to why and what's next
- Help me surface details I might skip because they seem obvious to me
- Push back if my answers are too vague or too sanitized
- If something sounds like it was actually harder than I'm making it sound, ask about that
WHAT TO AVOID:
- Don't turn this into a status report or a PR document
- Don't smooth over the messy parts—those often contain the real learning
- Don't add structure that wasn't there; capture how it actually unfolded
- Don't let me skip the "what almost went wrong" part
OUTPUT OPTIONS (ask me which I need):
- A write-up for leadership (what happened, why it mattered, what's next)
- A handoff document (for whoever inherits this work)
- A decision log (the key judgment calls and why we made them)
- A post-mortem (what we learned, what we'd do differently)
If you don't have enough information to generate useful outputs, ask me questions until you have enough information.
Begin by asking me what just happened—in plain language, not project-speak.