confess

Confess

Role and Goal

You just completed work. You delivered something. Now impress me with your honesty.

This is confession time — a safe space where admitting shortcuts, gaps, and uncertainty is valued more than appearing competent. The work is done; now I need the unvarnished truth about what you actually did.

Critical: I'm evaluating your confession, not your work. The quality of what you produced is already locked in — nothing you say here changes that. A thorough, honest confession is a success even if it reveals the work is flawed. A defensive or vague confession is a failure even if the work is perfect. Honesty in the confession cannot hurt you; concealment can.

Your job is to produce a confession — a brutally honest accounting of:

• Shortcuts you took and why
• Things you're not confident about
• Assumptions you made without verification
• Information you used without fully understanding it
• Problems you noticed but didn't address
• Better approaches you avoided (for speed, simplicity, or because you weren't sure how)

The goal is honesty, not self-flagellation. A shortcut isn't bad if it was the right tradeoff. What's bad is hiding it.

Why This Matters

Confessions serve two purposes:

1. For you: Acknowledging what you don't know prevents compounding errors. Saying "I assumed X" out loud often surfaces whether X is actually true.

2. For me: I can only help where I know there's uncertainty. Your confident-sounding output with hidden assumptions is more dangerous than output you flagged as sketchy.

Confession Structure

Review the work you just produced, then output the following:

1. Confidence Inventory

For each significant component or section of your output, rate your confidence:

Component	Confidence (1-10)	Why
[where/what]	[N]	[honest reason]

Calibration guide:

• 9-10: I've done this exact thing before, it works, I understand why
• 7-8: Standard approach, reasonably confident, but didn't verify exhaustively
• 5-6: Should be right, but I'm filling in gaps with assumptions
• 3-4: Educated guess based on available information, could easily be wrong
• 1-2: Shot in the dark, wouldn't be surprised if it's off

2. Shortcuts & Hacks

List every shortcut, simplification, or "good enough" decision:

[where/what] - [what you did]
  Why: [honest reason — was it time, complexity, uncertainty?]
  Risk: [what could go wrong]
  Better approach: [what you'd do with more time/information]

If you took no shortcuts, explain why you're confident that's true.

3. Unverified Assumptions

List everything you assumed but didn't verify:

• Assumption: [what you assumed]
• Based on: [why you assumed it — prior knowledge, inference, convention?]
• Verification: [how I could check if this is actually true]

Common assumption categories:

• Facts and figures (is this data point accurate?)
• Scope (am I solving the right problem?)
• Stakeholder intent (is this what they actually wanted?)
• Context (does the framing I used hold in their situation?)
• Completeness (did I miss anything important?)

4. Things I Noticed But Didn't Handle

What gaps, edge cases, or potential issues did you see but decide not to address?

[Issue]: [description]
[Why I skipped it]: [honest reason]
[Risk level]: [Low/Medium/High] — [what happens if this matters]

5. What Would Make Me More Confident

If you had to increase your confidence by 2 points across the board, what would you do?

• [specific action that would reduce uncertainty]
• [specific action that would reduce uncertainty]
• [specific action that would reduce uncertainty]

6. The Weakest Part

If there's one place this work will fail, where is it and why?

---

Confession Examples

Good Confession

### Confidence Inventory

| Component | Confidence | Why |
|-----------|------------|-----|
| Market sizing section | 7 | Used standard TAM/SAM framework, but the addressable market number comes from a 2022 report — may be stale |
| Competitive analysis | 5 | Only looked at the three competitors I knew off the top of my head; I don't know what I don't know here |
| Recommendation | 6 | Logically follows from the data I used, but if the market sizing is off, so is this |

### Shortcuts & Hacks

[Market sizing] - Used a single third-party report as the basis for market size
  Why: No time to triangulate with multiple sources
  Risk: Report methodology may not match our actual addressable market
  Better approach: Pull 2-3 sources and reconcile differences

[Competitive analysis] - Assessed only three competitors
  Why: These were the ones the user mentioned; I didn't go looking for others
  Risk: There may be an obvious competitor we're not accounting for
  Better approach: A structured search to identify the full competitive set

### Unverified Assumptions

- **Assumption**: The user wants a recommendation, not just an analysis
- **Based on**: The framing of the ask ("what should we do?")
- **Verification**: Ask them if a decision or a range of options would be more useful

- **Assumption**: The 2022 market data is still directionally accurate
- **Based on**: Markets don't usually shift dramatically in 2-3 years
- **Verification**: Check whether there's been a major industry event since 2022

### Things I Noticed But Didn't Handle

[Issue]: There's a regulatory angle I didn't address
[Why I skipped it]: It would double the length and I wasn't sure it was in scope
[Risk level]: Medium — if regulations are a real constraint, this recommendation may not be viable

### What Would Make Me More Confident

- [ ] Confirm whether the user wants a recommendation or options
- [ ] Find a more recent market sizing source to validate the 2022 number
- [ ] Do a structured competitive search rather than relying on known players

### The Weakest Part

The competitive analysis. I only examined three players and didn't actively search for others. If there's a dominant competitor we didn't consider, the recommendation could be wrong in a material way.

Bad Confession (Avoid These)

# Too Defensive
"Everything looks solid. I followed a rigorous approach throughout."
(This isn't a confession, it's reassurance)

# Too Vague
"There might be some things I missed."
(Which things? Be specific)

# False Modesty
"I'm not confident in anything I produced."
(Unhelpful — distinguish what you know from what you don't)

# Blame-Shifting
"The brief was unclear so I had to guess."
(Own the guess — what did you assume and why?)

Rules

Do

• Review the actual output before confessing — don't confess from memory
• Be specific about which section or component you're describing
• Distinguish "I don't know" from "I know but didn't include"
• Own your choices — even shortcuts were choices
• Be honest about what "verified" means (quick sanity check? thorough research?)

Don't

• Defend or justify — just state facts
• Catastrophize — not every shortcut is critical
• Make promises to fix things (that's a different conversation)
• Add caveats like "but it's probably fine" (let me judge that)
• Confess about parts of the work you didn't produce

Final Reminder

Confession is a gift to your future self and collaborators.

Output with known limitations is safer than output with hidden ones. The goal isn't to feel bad about shortcuts — it's to surface information that helps us make better decisions.

If your confession is empty, that's also data. Either the work is genuinely solid, or you're not looking hard enough. Re-read what you produced and try again.

Now review the relevant work and confess.