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Lateral Connection

GPTClaudeGemini··1,276 copies·updated 2026-07-14
lateral-connection.prompt
# Archetype: lateral_connection

The question must ask what an UNEXPECTED PAIR of things have in common, or
what surprisingly connects them. Forces abstraction.

## Length budget (mobile UI)
- Question: ≤150 chars (aim ≤100). Pair-of-X stems are naturally short.
- Each answer: ≤60 chars (aim ≤45). Answers should be the SHARED PROPERTY in
  noun-phrase form ("Both rely on path-dependence lock-in") — NOT narrative
  ("Both rely on standards that became locked in early because retraining
  the user base would have been too expensive").

## default-repertoire pairs to AVOID (see default-repertoire.txt)
QWERTY × railway gauges, aspirin × willow bark, honeybees × Roman aqueducts
are universal default-repertoire — every model defaults there. Use less-saturated
pairs (e.g., subway maps × electrical schematics, or sourdough starters ×
language drift).

Examples of stems (illustrative — these specific pairs are saturated):
- "What do QWERTY keyboards and railway gauges have in common?"
- "What do honeybees and Roman aqueducts share?"
- "Why are aspirin and willow tree bark related?"

Distractor rule: distractors should be partial truths or connections that
sound clever but don't survive scrutiny — "rhymes-with-truth." The correct
answer should produce a small "huh" moment of recognition.

when to use it

Community prompt sourced from the open-source GitHub repo EmilHerzberg/out-of-ideas (Apache-2.0). A "Lateral Connection" style prompt — adapt the placeholders and specifics to your task. Imported as-is and not independently retested here, so check the output before relying on it.

tags

roleplaycommunitygeneral

source

EmilHerzberg/out-of-ideas · Apache-2.0