# Pushback · the five questions I ask Claude out loud

Open the page. Start a voice session. Read the whole page out loud first, no questions. Then ask:

1. **What's missing from the flow?**
   Good answer: a specific box and who it's for. Bad answer: generic praise. Push until it names a box.
2. **Which of these ideas is bad, and why?**
   Good answer: one idea, one reason, one thing to cut. Ask it to be unkind.
3. **Where does this break at ten times the users or documents, or the day the model is down?**
   Good answer: a named component and a failure you can picture.
4. **What happens when the AI is wrong here? Who notices, when, and can it be undone?**
   Answer it per step. It sets the autonomy level:
   nobody hurt → autonomous · a bad draft → assisted · money or reputation → a human decides.
5. **What's the simplest architecture that survives those answers?**
   Good answer: fewer boxes than you started with.

End the call when the page is honest, not when it's pretty.

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The Paper-First Method by Sohaib Waheed · paperfirstmethod.com · free to use with credit (CC BY 4.0)