Try this 5-minute check. A client wants a website live on Friday. Your designer works Monday and Tuesday only. Your developer works Wednesday and Thursday only. The client has to approve by Thursday noon. Can you promise Friday?
Don’t answer yet. A Reddit prompt from r/ChatGPTPromptGenius makes you answer first and only then shows you what the AI thinks. That order is the whole trick. It sounds small, but it’s the difference between watching someone else solve a puzzle and actually solving it yourself.
🧪 The Setup
The prompt turns ChatGPT into a practice partner for reviewing a delivery plan. It runs on a fictional project, so nothing real is at risk. It also stops the model from inventing team availability or approvals. If something is missing, it has to say “this needs confirmation” instead of guessing. That alone is worth stealing, because most bad delivery promises start with a guess dressed up as a fact.
Here’s the fictional brief to feed it:
- Project: a one-page English website for a local business, public launch on Friday
- Designer: Monday and Tuesday only
- Developer: Wednesday and Thursday only
- Client approval: required by Thursday noon
- Initial plan: design Mon and Tue, build Wed and Thu, client review Thursday afternoon, publish Friday
See the problem yet? Hold that thought. Look at the order of the days and ask yourself who is actually working on Friday, and when the client is supposed to say yes.
🛠️ Step by Step
- Paste the prompt into ChatGPT. It will ask for a project brief, an initial plan, and one responsibility you want to practise. Give it the fictional brief above. For the responsibility, try “checking which delivery commitments I can make to the client.”
- It will ask which assumption in the plan most affects the delivery date, and why. Write your answer before it says anything. Seriously, type it out. Even a rough guess counts, because the point is to commit to a position before you see the AI’s.
- It then changes one condition (for example, the final copy arrives late) and asks what you would revise and which commitments need confirmation. Answer again, before reading its analysis. Think about who is affected first, then what has to move, then what you can no longer promise.
- Now it compares your reasoning with the brief and the changed condition. It points out where you used a supplied fact and where you slipped in an assumption.
- It suggests changes and asks you to review them before it writes a revised plan. You stay the editor. If a suggestion feels too optimistic, push back and ask it to explain which fact supports it.
🔍 What Your Results Mean
The original poster ran one scripted test on 19 October. The model waited for the learner’s explanation, then introduced late final copy. The scripted answer deliberately promised Friday work from a developer who is only around Wednesday and Thursday. The model caught the contradiction, questioned the launch promise, and asked for a review before writing anything new.
So check your own answers against that:
- You flagged the developer’s two-day window: good, you read the facts.
- You promised Friday without noticing: that’s the gap this exercise is built to show you. Nobody gets this right every time, and spotting it in a safe sandbox beats spotting it in front of a real client.
- You said “I’d confirm with the developer”: nice, that’s exactly the kind of commitment that needs confirmation.
- You caught the assumption but the AI caught more: even better, now you know what to look for next time.
The poster is upfront about the limits. This is one observed conversation, the model version wasn’t shown, and nobody has evaluated learning outcomes with real participants. Treat it as a neat practice drill, not proof that it trains anyone. The prompt also refuses to give a qualification or readiness score, so don’t expect a gold star.
💡 Extra Tips
- Write your answers in full sentences, not fragments. Fuzzy answers get fuzzy feedback.
- Run it twice with a different changed condition. Late copy one round, a client who moves the approval deadline the next.
- Swap in a project from your own field, but keep it fictional. The prompt is built to keep everything inside the conversation.
- Notice where you assume something instead of reading it. That habit shows up in real plans too.
- Underline every day, name, and deadline in the brief before you answer. If a claim in your answer can’t point back to one of those, it’s probably an assumption.
- Try a quick gut check in real life: before you tell a client “yes, Friday,” list who touches the work on each day and who signs off. If any day has a gap, the answer is “let me confirm.”
Disclosure from the original post: the author publishes topmoller.com, and their AI assistant prepared the prompt and the test. The exercise builds on a delivery-plan example from their article about reviewing AI-assisted work.
🏴☠️ Your Turn
Run the Friday launch test and see if you catch the problem before the AI does. Then tell us what you found! If you tweaked the prompt to get better results, share your version so the next sailor can steal it.
Practise checking an AI-assisted delivery plan before seeing the model’s analysis
by u/jacob_top in ChatGPTPromptGenius