LLM prompt I use many times a week: write a 1-paragraph summary of the core thesis of this writing, not as "this essay presents" / no reference to the author or the piece being summarized or "the thesis". just walking through the idea/logic in such a way that a very smart person reading it would immediately see the implications (which can also be spelled out, to be clear! ...but don't refer to "the implications" either)
An LLM prompt for compressing writing into its core thesis
12 tweets · October 2025 · 162 likes · 17 retweets · read on Twitter
LLMs are very good at summarizing but by default they interpret "summarize" as more like a book report rather than a purposeful compression. they end up commenting on the writing as writing, or hitting each sub-point without attempting to convey the overall thrust
probably due to being trained on a lot of both random internet crap and on guess-the-teacher's-password homework. what are the purposes of such pieces? - content marketing - dumbing ideas down - getting people to read the original - convincing someone you read the original
I had to add quite a lot of caveats to get Claude to stop referring to the summary as a summary / adding outside text! like I had "no reference to the author or the piece being summarized" but it would say "the thesis" 😂 but now it treats the ideas directly, and it's great!
this is likely to be quite helpful for using LLMs to summarize other pieces of writing, which is a very useful use for them so that you can get on with writing your own takes!
before I added " ...but don't refer to "the implications" either" it would of course often say "the implications are profound:". now often I'm having it summarizing something whose implications ARE profound... but that phrase has got LLM smell, and also distracts
also what's fun is that with popular enough ideas or books or essays, you don't even have to put in the full text! you can just say "...the core thesis of Michael Levin's work" and it'll lay it all out! here's it compared with a simple "write a 1-paragraph summary" prompt
I wanted to speed up my loop on being able to run this prompt, so I built a system with keyboard maestro that lets me with one hotkey turn whatever's on my clipboard into a "core thesis" - and it'll fetch a url's content, or can just use a phrase copied from something I'm reading
I have a loose intention soon to take a bunch of works that have been influential for me, as well as some of my own writing or other unpublished pieces, run them through this, and then put 1-2 dozen summaries into a context window to get an LLM that's more on my wavelength
oh you can also do this with a conversation you've HAD with an LLM, if it lays out a case for something! in most convos this won't be relevant but sometimes it will be.
btw @aphercotropist I keep thinking of your work on removal of self when I look at the contrast between the book report summaries and the core thesis summaries. one of the main differences (aside from density) is that mine treats the ideas directly rather than referring TO them
ah nice, this is great yeah maybe the concept of "summary" is just too fraught! mine seems to do okay though, and there is something about "core thesis" that feels a bit less about just "restructure the info" curious for others' existing approaches, also!