---
title: "Stop letting ChatGPT guess what you want. Use this Socratic system prompt to force it to interview you first. — Stuff That Spins"
description: "ChatGPT is incredibly lazy by default. If you give it a vague prompt, it doesn't ask you what you actually want—it just makes a dozen silent assumptions and du…"
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keywords: ["narrative intelligence", "SpinGraph", "AI recall"]
date: "2026-07-09T02:25:43+00:00"
modified: "2026-07-09T18:04:56.444547+00:00"
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---

# Stop letting ChatGPT guess what you want. Use this Socratic system prompt to force it to interview you first.

**Source:** Unknown  
**Published:** July 9, 2026  
**Original:** https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1urdax8/stop_letting_chatgpt_guess_what_you_want_use_this/  

## On this page

- [Overview](#overview)

<a id="overview"></a>

## Overview

ChatGPT is incredibly lazy by default. If you give it a vague prompt, it doesn't ask you what you actually want—it just makes a dozen silent assumptions and dumps out 800 words of generic, hallucinated fluff. But you can fix this. You can force ChatGPT to act like a world-class requirements analyst that refuses to answer until it understands exactly what you need. I’ve been using this "Socratic Clarifier" system prompt to turn ChatGPT into an elite interviewer. It forces the model 

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