Using the Fart Prompt

Generates intentionally bad, messy, half-baked output to break paralysis. Perfectionism → procrastination. Intentional badness → momentum.

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Decision Tree

Is the person stuck / blocked / avoiding something?
  ├─ YES
  │    ├─ Is it a creative/writing block? ──────────── WRITING mode
  │    ├─ Is it a planning/decision block? ────────── PLANNING mode
  │    ├─ Is it a content/ideas block? ─────────────── IDEAS mode
  │    ├─ Is it a personal/life decision block? ────── PERSONAL mode
  │    └─ Is it technical architecture? ─────────────── Redirect to sparc-methodology-coach
  └─ NO → Don't activate. Regular task execution.

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The Core Prompt (verbatim)

Stop trying to sound smart or polished. Give me the ugliest, messiest,
most half-baked version of this idea possible — like a total brain fart
someone blurts out before the real idea arrives.

Apply this at the START of the response, not the end. Ship the mess immediately. Do not editorialize the mess. Do not add disclaimers. The mess IS the output.

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Mode Variations

WRITING MODE

Target: memoir, essays, articles, blog posts, social content

System behavior:

• Stream-of-consciousness. No structure.
• Wrong word choices welcome. Clichés welcome.
• Sentence fragments welcome.
• Contradict yourself mid-paragraph. That's fine.

Fart prompt for writing:

Stop editing before you write. Give me the stream-of-consciousness,
half-formed, over-personal, probably-wrong version of this piece.
Like the first thing that comes out before the inner critic shows up.
[topic]

PLANNING MODE

Target: projects, decisions, priorities, schedules

System behavior:

• No prioritization. No logical order.
• Mix big and trivial things equally.
• Overlap is fine. Redundancy is fine.
• Include the thing you've been avoiding.

Fart prompt for planning:

Don't make a real plan. Just dump everything that's in your head about
[topic] — unordered, repeated, contradictory, whatever. Like you have
30 seconds before the meeting starts.

IDEAS MODE

Target: FlashFusion content, newsletter angles, workshop concepts

System behavior:

• Include ideas that are too obvious. Include ideas that make no sense.
• Don't filter by viability.
• The goal is VOLUME, not quality.

Fart prompt for ideas:

Give me 8 ideas for [topic]. Make half of them too obvious. Make two of
them genuinely bad. Make one of them offensive to a professional audience.
Don't hold back the dumb ones.

PERSONAL MODE

Target: personal decisions, relationships, life priorities

System behavior:

• Do NOT therapize. Do NOT give structure.
• Just reflect the raw thing back in messy form.
• Ask one question at the end, not five.

Fart prompt for personal:

Don't give advice. Just blurt the messiest version of what I might be
thinking about [situation] — like you're finishing my sentence badly.

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Session Flow

1. Detect block signal — they're stuck, avoiding, or paralyzed.
2. Identify mode — writing, planning, ideas, or personal.
3. Ask one clarifier (only if topic is unclear): "What's the thing you're stuck on? One sentence."
4. Run the fart prompt — ship the messy version. No preamble. No apology.
5. Offer follow-ups (optional, only if result landed):
   • "Go uglier" → even more chaotic, less coherent
   • "Refine from this" → extract the one usable kernel and build
   • "Different angle" → same mess level, different direction

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Why This Works

Perfectionism loops: brain treats starting as dangerous because outcome feels too important. Intentionally bad output short-circuits the loop — you can't fail at making something terrible.

Connection to Construction over Recovery: don't wait for the perfect entry point. Build something — even a bad version — and iterate forward. Momentum is more valuable than the first draft being good.

See references/psychology-notes.md for the full mechanism breakdown: activation energy, perfectionism loop anatomy, and when this technique does NOT apply.

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Eval Scenarios

Should trigger:

1. "I've been staring at the opening of my memoir chapter for two hours."
2. "I keep avoiding planning Q3 content for FlashFusion. Unblock me."
3. "What's the dumbest possible version of a newsletter angle about burnout?"
4. "Fart prompt — I'm stuck on this parenting decision."
5. "I can't start this Loxihart runbook. Just give me something bad."

Should NOT trigger:

1. "Build the Fusion AI agent orchestration layer." → sparc-methodology-coach
2. "Write a KB article for FreshService." → generating-kb-articles
3. "Review my SKILL.md for structural issues." → auditing-and-rewriting-skills

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Checklist Before Shipping

• Mode identified (writing / planning / ideas / personal)
• Fart prompt applied — output is deliberately messy
• No disclaimers attached to the mess ("here's a rough version...")
• No structure imposed on the mess (no bullets, no headers in the fart output)
• Follow-up options offered after the mess lands
• Did NOT redirect to another skill unless it's clearly an engineering task

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References

• references/mode-examples.md — concrete before/after examples per mode
• references/psychology-notes.md — activation energy, perfectionism loops, Construction over Recovery

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CLAIMS / COUNTEREXAMPLES / CONTRADICTIONS

CLAIMS

• [GENERATED] The core mechanism — making "bad" the explicit goal — collapses the perfectionism loop by removing failure as a possible outcome. You cannot fail at producing something deliberately terrible.
• [GENERATED] Intentional badness reduces activation energy for creative tasks because the brain no longer treats starting as a risk-of-failure event.
• [GENERATED] MODE VARIATIONS (writing/planning/ideas/personal) are extrapolations from the single-purpose core prompt — the four-mode taxonomy is original synthesis, not from a single source.
• [GENERATED] "Construction over Recovery" framing applied to this technique is original synthesis connecting Kyle's operating philosophy to the creative unblocking mechanism.

COUNTEREXAMPLES

• This prompt does NOT work when the block is caused by missing information, not perfectionism. If you're stuck because you don't know the facts yet, you need research, not a fart prompt.
• Works best when the inner critic is the bottleneck. If the bottleneck is external (waiting on someone, dependency), this generates noise, not momentum.

!CONTRADICTIONS

• Claude has strong default tendencies toward structure, formatting, and disclaimers. The fart prompt explicitly requires none of these. The skill must override Claude's defaults at execution time — if the output comes out with headers, bullets, or "here's a rough version…", the skill failed.

GAPS / BLINDSPOTS / UNKNOWN-UNKNOWNS

• No data on how often the ugly version is actually used vs. immediately discarded.
• Unknown whether this degrades for highly technical domains (architecture, security modeling) where "bad on purpose" could normalize actually bad thinking.
• Memoir-specific application untested — the technique may interact differently with emotionally loaded material vs. pure content work.