For Students

BIG Tools is designed to support — not replace — your thinking. This page is for workshop participants: how to use the tools well, what to push on, and what to let go.

Before you start

You don't need a polished idea. You need something to notice. A rough observation ("I saw X happen and it bothered me") is a better seed than a half-baked solution.

If you have a seed, paste it in. If you don't, start a conversation with someone in your cohort — the best seeds come from noticing what annoys you about a thing you use every day.

Promoting candidates

At every stage you get up to 5 candidates and promote 1–5. Rule of thumb:

• Promote 3 or fewer if the candidates are strong and distinct
• Promote 4–5 if you're genuinely unsure which direction is right
• Promote 0 if the candidates are weak — re-run with a different LLM or edit your input

Promoting everything is a way of not deciding. The tools reward decision-making.

When to re-open a stage

If a later stage feels off — the Pitch is hedging, Filter is rejecting everything, Steal is suggesting nonsense — the problem is almost always upstream. Use re-open to revise to go back to an earlier stage and edit.

Good reasons to re-open:

• Your Purpose Profile in Filter doesn't match who you actually want to serve
• A promoted HMW from Reframe is too specific or too vague
• Mixtape's theme feels generic and you want to pick a better organizing metaphor

Trying different LLMs

Each tool has a model picker. You can run the same stage through a different LLM and compare.

When to swap models:

• The default output feels generic — try a smaller, faster model for a more contrarian take
• The output is too specific to one domain — try a larger model to broaden the lens
• You want a second opinion before committing

Pacing

A single progression takes 20–45 minutes of focused work. Longer if you're re-opening stages to revise. If you're in a workshop, your instructor will usually give you a pacing target — stick to it. You can always come back to a progression; the Kanban saves your state.

Exporting your work

When you hit Pitch, export to XLS. The export includes:

• Your original seed
• Every candidate generated at every stage
• The ones you promoted and the ones you didn't
• The final Mixtape theme and Pitch

This is your artifact. Keep it, share it, reference it when you pitch the idea to someone outside the workshop.

Things worth remembering

• The tools structure; you decide. If a suggestion feels wrong, it's wrong. Promote based on judgment, not on what scored highest.
• Divergence is the job of NGT and Steal. Don't expect them to give you a single answer.
• Convergence is the job of Filter, Mixtape, and Pitch. Don't expect them to surprise you.
• Re-opening is not failure. It's how the process works.

Want to see the prompts?

BIG Tools isn't magic — each tool is a specific prompt sent to an LLM. If you want to understand what the tool is doing, or run the same kind of operation in your own LLM chat, every tool has a recipe page with:

• The exact system prompt, verbatim
• A worked example (input and output)
• Paste-ready snippets for TypeScript, Python, and curl
• Tuning tips (temperature, model suggestions) and common failure modes

Start with Recipe: Reframe or Recipe: NGT. Reading the prompts is often the fastest way to understand how a tool thinks — and a good starting point if you want to adapt the process for your own work outside BIG Tools.