The problem with AI feedback
Hand an AI your outline, plan or spreadsheet and ask for feedback. Nine times out of ten it starts rewriting. You wanted a second pair of eyes and got a ghostwriter instead. Your voice disappears, your structure gets shuffled, and now you have to untangle what changed before you can even judge whether the advice was any good.
A Reddit post on r/PromptEngineering by u/coursiv_ offers a small fix. Instead of asking for improvements, ask for noticing. Here is the prompt:
Here’s my [outline / plan / spreadsheet / draft]. Don’t rewrite anything. Tell me three patterns or connections I might not have noticed, and point to where you see each one.
Why each part earns its place
The prompt is only three sentences, but each one does a job.
- “Don’t rewrite anything” blocks the jump to fixes. The model has nowhere to go except observation. Your original stays untouched, so you can compare every comment against the real thing.
- “Three” caps the answer. Without a number, models pad the list with obvious points. With three, they have to pick, and the picks tend to be the strongest signals in the material.
- “Point to where you see each one” forces the model to quote its evidence. You can check each claim against your own work and see whether the pattern is real or invented.
That last line matters most. An observation you can’t verify is just a guess. An observation tied to a line in your draft is something you can test in ten seconds. If the AI says your openings all start with a question, you scroll to the quoted lines and see it for yourself. If the quotes don’t match the claim, throw the pattern out and move on.
A practical tip: paste your material right after the prompt, not before it. The instruction stays fresh in the model’s context, and it is less likely to drift back into rewriting mode halfway through a long answer.
Where it breaks
The author is upfront about two limits, and they match what many of us have seen.
- Short pieces: the AI tends to find patterns that aren’t there. Give it a three-line note and it will still try to deliver three insights. If your piece is under a couple of hundred words, treat the output with extra suspicion, or ask for one pattern instead of three.
- Very long files: it can skim past the middle. Split the work into sections and run the prompt on each. A 40-row spreadsheet is fine in one go. A 4,000-row export is better handled in chunks, and you can then ask a second question about patterns across the chunks.
It works in Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT, so you don’t need a specific tool. If one model gives you something thin, paste the same prompt into another and compare. Patterns that show up in two models are usually worth your time.
What the community added
The thread is small, but the replies are useful.
- u/ukaeh uses “advise only” to get the same effect. Short and it works. It is a good fit when you are in a hurry and don’t want to retype the full prompt.
- u/Icy-Practice-5812 flips the question and asks for the weakest connection instead of the strongest patterns. Same idea: the AI points at something specific without trying to fix it.
The flipped version is worth trying. Patterns tell you what’s working. Weak links tell you what to fix yourself. Run both versions on the same draft and you get a fuller picture, one list to protect and one list to repair, and you stay in charge of every change.
Use Cases
- 📝 Content outlines: spot a theme you keep repeating without noticing, such as three sections that all make the same point in different words
- 📊 Spreadsheets: find connections between columns you never compared, like refund rates that climb whenever a certain product category does
- 📅 Plans and roadmaps: see where tasks quietly depend on each other, so you catch the step that blocks three others
- Drafts: notice a habit in your openings or transitions, such as leaning on the same connecting phrase in every paragraph
Prompt of the Day
Here’s my [paste your outline, plan, spreadsheet or draft]. Don’t rewrite anything. Tell me three patterns or connections I might not have noticed, and point to where you see each one. Then tell me which of the three you are least sure about.
The last line is our small addition. It nudges the model to flag its own shaky guesses, which helps on shorter pieces where invented patterns creep in. When the AI names its weakest pick, you know which quote to check first, and you can often skip the other two checks because the model has already told you where to be skeptical.
Call to Action
Pick one thing you’re working on today and run this prompt on it. Check each pattern against the quoted evidence, and keep only the ones that hold up. Then tell us what you add to your own prompts to get observations instead of edits.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What’s the simplest way to stop the AI from rewriting my work?
Tell it outright that you want advice only, with no edits and no new draft. Asking it to point to the exact line or section it means keeps the response in observation mode. Several commenters said that one phrase does most of the work, and the full prompt above just makes it explicit.
Q: Should I ask for patterns or for the weakest connection?
Both get you observations, but they lead to different answers. Asking for patterns tends to surface themes you already half-know, while asking for the weakest connection makes the model point at one specific spot that needs a closer look. Some readers prefer the second because it leaves less room for filler.
Q: Does this work on short pieces?
Less reliably. One commenter found that under roughly 800 words the model starts inventing links between ideas that aren’t really connected. For short drafts, ask for one observation at a time, and throw out anything you can’t trace back to a quote.
Q: Can I use it to find connections between two separate sections?
One commenter pastes two unrelated sections together and asks whether anything bridges them, and says that works better than asking for patterns across a single document. The risk is the same, though: the model may invent a bridge just to be helpful. Keep a bridge only if you can point to a sentence in each section that actually supports it.
A prompt for getting AI to notice patterns in your own work without rewriting it
by u/coursiv_ in PromptEngineering