One Question, Answered Across a Whole Folder

What it is for

How to get something you can act on out of a folder of documents: curate the folder deliberately, query it in the documents' own vocabulary, record one row per source, then find the contradictions yourself. Reach for it during a literature review or a comparison of vendor reports. It assumes only that the tool summarises and searches across a folder, not that it will obey a formatting contract. It prevents the smooth merged paragraph that averages strong and weak sources into an unattributable claim.

The skill Copy

Build the folder before you ask anything. A cross-document answer
is only as honest as the pile it reads. Twelve papers that agree
because you collected twelve agreeing papers is not a finding.

Before the first query:
  - Add at least two documents you expect to disagree with the rest.
  - Remove review articles that restate the others; they double-count
    the same original result.
  - Write the date range of the folder in one line. Old and new in
    one pile makes "the evidence says" meaningless.

Query in the words the documents themselves would use - dose,
attrition, control group, sample size - not in a paragraph of
instructions about how to answer. Search-shaped questions get
search-shaped results back; long formatting demands do not survive.

Keep the per-source answer by hand. Open a four-column table:

  DOCUMENT | WHAT IT CLAIMS | EVIDENCE OFFERED | PAGE

Fill one row per document, one document at a time. A document that
does not address the question gets a row saying so - that row is
data, do not delete it. Never let one blended paragraph stand in
for the table.

Then do the part no tool does for you. Read the WHAT IT CLAIMS
column top to bottom and mark every pair that cannot both be true.
Copy those conflicting sentences side by side with their sources.
That short list of conflicts is the output you came for, and it is
the first thing a merged summary destroys.

The failure this prevents: one confident paragraph that averages a
strong study, a weak study and a blog post into a claim you cannot
attribute to anybody. When it turns out to be wrong, you have no
way to find which source poisoned it.

If a blended answer comes back anyway, treat it as a table of
contents, not as an answer, and go fill the table from the sources.

How to install it Copy

1. Open the tool and start a new conversation, project or template.
2. Paste the text below wherever the tool keeps standing instructions
   — usually called system prompt, instructions, or persona.
3. Save it so it applies to every run rather than a single message.

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Where it came from