A quiet drop hit r/PromptEngineering this week, and it comes with a genuinely uncomfortable premise baked right into the product. Most AI chat tools nod along no matter what you feed them, even after you explicitly tell them to “be critical.” Ask ChatGPT or Claude to poke holes in your startup idea and you usually get three bullet points of praise followed by one soft, hedged concern buried at the bottom. The original poster, a Redditor who got fed up with that pattern after watching yet another sycophantic response to a half-baked plan, built a notebook called Paper whose only job is to test your ideas, not solve them and not approve of them.
Here’s the twist. Paper won’t give you an answer at all. Feed it a rough thought, and it fires back a question instead, pushing the actual thinking back onto you. One commenter tried it on a “chat app like Discord clone” idea and got this in return: “Think about how structuring the server and channel hierarchy will handle permission roles for different user groups.” No solution, no code snippet, just a mirror pointed straight at the gap in the plan. Another tester ran a rough pricing model through it and instead of getting a spreadsheet or a formula, got asked what happens to the model the day a competitor undercuts the entry tier. That’s the kind of question a cofounder asks you at 11pm, not the kind a chatbot usually bothers with.
That’s the part worth sitting with if you build brainstorming tools yourself. Refusing to be helpful, in the usual sense, is the actual feature here. Most AI products compete on how fast they can hand you a finished answer. Paper competes on how long it can keep you in the uncomfortable middle where the thinking actually happens. It’s a strange thing to build a product around, and it only works because most tools race the other direction.
How to run your own half-baked idea through it:
- Drop a raw thought into Paper, even one you haven’t fully formed yet 📝, the messier the better since a clean pitch gives it nothing to probe
- Let it respond with a probing question instead of a fix, and resist the urge to immediately ask it to just tell you the answer
- Answer honestly, in your own words, before you ask it anything back, since typing out a real answer is what actually surfaces the gap
- Repeat until the weak spots in your logic surface on their own 🔍, usually somewhere around the third or fourth round of questions
- Once the idea holds up, take it to an actual builder tool to execute ⚙️, whether that’s a coding assistant, a deck, or a plain outline
Pro tip: if the questions feel too generic, steal the line another commenter dropped in the thread, swap “be critical” for “accuracy > agreement.” It’s a sharper instruction than “be critical” ever was, and it matches exactly what this notebook is trying to do. “Be critical” still lets a model soften its punches. “Accuracy over agreement” tells it flatly which one wins when the two conflict, and that one phrase alone is worth copying into your own prompts even if you never touch Paper.
Second pro tip: treat this as a pressure-test stage, not a finished product. It’s early alpha, a few commenters called it rough around the edges, and one flat out said it “needs work.” The interface is bare, the questions occasionally repeat themselves, and it has no memory of past sessions yet, so don’t expect it to track a project over weeks. Use it to stress-test an idea before you build, not as your only thinking tool, and pair it with a real builder or a human collaborator once the core idea has survived a few rounds of interrogation.
The fair pushback in the thread is worth knowing too. If the tool can’t give solutions and can’t validate you, what keeps someone opening it a second time. Plenty of commenters pointed out that a tool built entirely on friction is a hard sell once the novelty wears off, and a few said they’d rather get a blunt “this won’t work” than an endless string of questions with no verdict at the end. That’s the open question the creator still has to answer, and it’s exactly why this is worth watching as it grows past alpha. If it can find a way to close the loop, even occasionally, without slipping back into the agreeable assistant pattern it’s rebelling against, it becomes something genuinely rare.
The full build and the rest of the discussion are one click away in the original Reddit thread. Go poke holes in your own thinking before Paper does it for you 🚀
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How does Paper work with ideas that are still rough around the edges?
Paper works best with ideas that have some substance to them. If you’re still in the “I dunno, what if…” stage, Paper will help you clarify your thinking through guided questions first. Once you’ve actually articulated what you’re exploring, that’s when Paper kicks in to poke holes and test your logic.
Q: Why should I use Paper instead of just thinking in a blank notebook?
A blank notebook is passive, you get to sit with your own thoughts without any pushback. Paper is the opposite. It doesn’t validate everything you throw at it; instead, it actively challenges weak assumptions and forces you to think deeper. Think of it as having a skeptical friend who actually listens and pushes back, rather than just talking to yourself.
Q: Why doesn’t “be critical” work with AI, and what actually does?
Telling an AI to “be critical” sounds good in theory but often backfires, it just ends up agreeing with you anyway. What works better is reframing it as “accuracy over agreement”, that tells the AI that truth-seeking matters more than politeness. Some users also find it helps to give specific examples of pushback you want, so the AI knows what genuine skepticism looks like.
Built a Notebook with a AI assistant that doesn’t validate you
by u/Tight-Instruction-17 in PromptEngineering