Find What a Document Leaves Out

What it is for

A method for questions about what a document does not say — the one thing a retrieval-based chat is structurally bad at. It converts an absence question into a location question and a structural outline you can check by eye. Reach for it in contract review, methods checks, and policy gaps, where a wrong "it is not mentioned" is expensive.

The skill Copy

A question box over a document cannot prove a negative. It surfaces
passages that resemble your question; silence from it means nothing
at all. So never accept "the document does not mention X" as an
answer.

Convert every absence question into a location question:

  "Where in this document would <TOPIC> be discussed, if it were
   discussed at all? List the section headings and page ranges
   most likely to cover it, even if you find nothing there."

Then open those pages and look. That is the answer.

Second pass — make the document show you its own shape:

  "List the section headings of this document in order, with their
   page numbers, exactly as they appear."

Compare that outline against what a complete document of this kind
would contain. The gap is your finding, and it is defensible,
because you reached it by reading the structure rather than by
trusting a silence.

Where this earns its keep:
  - a contract with no termination-for-convenience clause
  - a report with no confidence intervals anywhere in it
  - a methods section that never mentions blinding
  - a policy that never names who approves an exception

Write the finding honestly:

  "Pages 1–44 contain no clause on <X>; sections 6 and 9 are
   where such a clause would sit."

Not: "the tool says there is no clause on X."

The failure this prevents: telling a client or a supervisor that a
document is silent on something when it addresses it in an
appendix, a table, or a page that arrived as an image and was never
properly read.

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