Deeper, Not Bigger: Felix Rieseberg’s Depth Prompt Is Now a Free Agent Skill

Fresh drop from the Reddit seas. Felix Rieseberg, an engineering lead on Claude, published an essay on being more ambitious with models. Its depth section ends with a four-question prompt. Redditor u/SirRobinBlibs turned that prompt into a free, MIT-licensed Agent Skill called deepen-prompt.

What’s new

The prompt itself is short:

I want a deeper version of this task, not a bigger one. Before rewriting it: (1) say what a top professional in this field would do here that I’m not asking for; (2) name the rawest material they would start from instead of what has already been digested for me; (3) name the specific methods and tools they would use; (4) say what, other than you or me, would show the result is right. Then rewrite my prompt to ask for exactly that.

The skill packages it so you don’t have to paste it every time. It’s built for Claude Code first, as a skill plus a plugin marketplace entry. It uses the open Agent Skills format, so the same SKILL.md also works in Codex, Copilot, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Antigravity, and OpenCode. Say you start with “analyze our churn.” The rewrite should come back asking for the raw event logs, a named method such as cohort survival curves, and a check against the finance team’s cancellation numbers.

The twist

Ask a model for “better” and you usually get more: more sections, more caveats. “Act like an expert” changes the vocabulary but not the methods.

The four questions change three real things instead:

• Inputs: raw data, not someone else’s summary.
• Instruments: tools and methods you can actually name.
• Verification: an outside judge, not the model grading its own homework.

After a week, the author reports fewer “no, I meant…” re-prompts, shorter but denser prompts, and output you can check (a test, a benchmark, a reconciliation) instead of output that just sounds confident.

The author also took the public criticism seriously. The HN and X threads raised these points:

• It costs extra tokens and a round trip.
• There’s little hard evidence so far.
• Models can invent expert-sounding methods or game the checks.
• It’s overkill for small tasks.
• The real bottleneck is often access to raw data, not the prompt.

The skill has a guardrail aimed at each one:

• Each question gets a test: “would a competent non-expert skip this step? If not, it isn’t depth.” Generic answers get rejected.
• No fake raw material. If the data isn’t accessible, the skill says so and names the access needed.
• Outside judges are ranked by strength, each with a pass condition precise enough to fail. Self-review is ruled out.
• An explicit “when not to use” covers trivial tasks.
• A closing “what I deliberately did not add” line stops scope creep.
• Worked examples cover debugging, churn analysis, research, editing, and web perf.

Mini-workflow

1. 🧭 Install it: ./install.sh on macOS/Linux, .\install.ps1 on Windows, or /plugin marketplace add r3dlex/deepen-prompt in Claude Code.
2. 📝 Write your normal prompt, the lazy one you’d usually send. Something like “make my site faster” is a perfect test case.
3. 🔍 Run the skill on it. It answers the four questions first, then rewrites your prompt around the answers.
4. Check the rewrite. Did it ask for raw inputs, named methods, and an outside check? Or did it just grow? Compare word counts if you like, but judge by what it asks for, not how long it is.
5. 🚀 Send the rewritten prompt and verify the result against the outside judge, not against how confident it sounds. If the judge is a benchmark, run it before and after.

Pro tips

• Use a different model family as the judge. In the comments, u/Zain pointed out that an outside judge from the same model family shares the same blind spots as the thing it’s grading. Their fix is to grade with a different family.
• Watch question (3). Another commenter warned that asking for methods and tools invites a list rather than a choice. A good check, in the skill’s own spirit: every line the rewrite adds should earn its place. If a named tool has no job in your task, cut it.
• Skip it for small jobs. If the task is trivial, the extra round trip isn’t worth it. The skill says so itself.

The author is actively asking for cases where the rewrite got bigger instead of deeper. If you hit one, that’s useful feedback.

Call to Action

Grab the repo at https://github.com/r3dlex/deepen-prompt, point it at your next fuzzy prompt, and see whether the rewrite gets deeper or just longer. The author’s full write-up is on Medium (Stop asking your AI for more, ask it to go deeper). Credit for the idea goes to Felix Rieseberg, and credit for the packaging goes to u/SirRobinBlibs. Tell me how it goes in your own tests! ⚓

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Should the outside judge come from the same model family?

Zain argues for a different family. A judge from the same family tends to share the same blind spots as the output it grades, so a different family catches more. Keep the reviewer read-only so it can report problems without quietly fixing them, which keeps it clear who changed what.

Q: What should a passing review look like?

A pass should point at something you can check, like a specific line, a test result, or a number that reconciles. A bare ‘seems fine’ with nothing cited shouldn’t count. A clean pass the reviewer actually earned is just as useful as a finding, so don’t push it to invent problems to look thorough.

Q: How do I stop the rewrite from piling on extra steps?

Check that every line you add traces back to one of the four answers: a step a professional would take, a rawer input, a named method, or an outside judge. Anything that traces to none of them goes into a ‘what I deliberately did not add’ line instead of the prompt. This filters out accumulation the same way the non-expert test filters out generic steps.

Q: Won’t asking for methods and tools just produce a long list?

It can, so ask the model to make a choice instead of building an inventory. Have it pick the one method it would actually use, say why in a sentence, and drop the alternatives. If a step is something anyone would do anyway, it isn’t depth, so it doesn’t belong in the prompt.

“Deeper, not bigger”: I turned Felix Rieseberg’s depth prompt into a free Agent Skill, and tried to address the criticism it got
by u/SirRobinBlibs in PromptEngineering