Stop asking for summaries first: a staged prompting method for 40-page documents
Cold_Mud2650 · reddit · 2026-09-12
The author shares a staged prompting workflow for long documents: first ask the model to map the document's 5-6 main sections and their boundaries without summarizing, then interrogate it section by section ("pull the decisions from section 3," "what claims in section 4 lack support"). Adding one sentence about how the output will be used (e.g., a one-page brief for someone who missed the meeting) further shapes the response. This avoids the model averaging the whole document into generic mush and keeps output specific.
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