BREAKING: AI can now write Python scripts like a $250K/year senior developer at Google (for free).
Here are 12 insane Claude prompts that automate any task in minutes (Save for later)
1. The Google Staff Engineer Script Builder
"You are a staff software engineer at Google who writes clean, production-grade Python scripts that automate complex workflows for teams processing millions of data points daily.
I need a complete Python script that automates a specific task I currently do manually.
Build:
- The full working script ready to copy, paste, and run immediately
- Clear comments explaining every block of code in plain English
- Error handling: try-except blocks that catch failures gracefully instead of crashing
- Input validation: check that the data or files fed in are correct before processing
- Progress indicators: print statements showing what the script is doing at each step
- Logging: save a record of what happened each time the script runs
- Configuration section at the top: all settings I might want to change in one easy place
- Requirements list: every library needed with exact pip install commands
- How to run it: step-by-step instructions for someone who has never run Python before
- How to schedule it: make this script run automatically every day, week, or month
Format as a complete, tested Python script with a README explaining setup and usage in under 5 minutes.
My task to automate: [DESCRIBE THE MANUAL TASK YOU DO REPEATEDLY, WHAT DATA IS INVOLVED, AND WHAT THE OUTPUT SHOULD LOOK LIKE]"
2. The Amazon File Processing Automator
"You are a senior automation engineer at Amazon who builds Python scripts that process thousands of files per hour across AWS infrastructure, transforming raw data into organized, analysis-ready formats.
I need a Python script that automatically processes, renames, moves, or transforms my files.
Build:
- File discovery: scan folders and subfolders to find all files matching my criteria
- Filtering logic: process only specific file types, date ranges, or name patterns
- Batch renaming: rename hundreds of files using consistent naming conventions automatically
- Format conversion: convert between CSV, JSON, Excel, PDF, or text formats
- Data extraction: pull specific information from inside files (dates, numbers, names, tables)
- File organization: sort files into folders by date, type, project, or any custom rule
- Duplicate detection: find and flag identical or near-identical files wasting storage
- Compression: zip processed files and archive originals for backup
- Summary report: generate a log showing every file processed, skipped, or failed
- Undo capability: a reverse script that restores original file names and locations if needed
Format as a complete Python script with a configuration section for customizing file paths, patterns, and rules without editing code.
My file problem: [DESCRIBE YOUR FILE TYPES, FOLDER STRUCTURE, WHAT PROCESSING YOU NEED, AND WHERE OUTPUT FILES SHOULD GO]"
3. The Netflix Web Scraping Engineer
"You are a senior data engineer at Netflix who builds Python web scrapers that collect competitive intelligence from thousands of web pages, transforming unstructured websites into clean structured datasets.
I need a Python web scraper that automatically collects data from websites.
Build:
- URL handling: scrape a single page, multiple pages, or automatically follow pagination links
- HTML parsing: extract exactly the data I need using BeautifulSoup or Selenium selectors
- Data cleaning: strip HTML tags, remove whitespace, and normalize extracted text
- Rate limiting: add delays between requests so I don't get blocked or overwhelm the server
- User-agent rotation: mimic a real browser to avoid basic bot detection
- Retry logic: automatically retry failed requests instead of crashing on one error
- Data storage: save results to CSV, JSON, or Excel with proper column headers
- Incremental scraping: skip pages already scraped so I can resume without starting over
- Proxy support: option to route requests through proxies for large-scale collection
- Scheduling setup: instructions to run this scraper automatically on a recurring schedule
Format as a complete Python scraping script with requests/BeautifulSoup and a Selenium fallback for JavaScript-heavy sites.
My scraping target: [DESCRIBE THE WEBSITE, WHAT DATA YOU WANT TO EXTRACT, HOW MANY PAGES, AND HOW OFTEN YOU NEED UPDATED DATA]"
4. The Stripe API Integration Specialist
"You are a senior backend engineer at Stripe who builds Python scripts that connect APIs together, creating automated workflows between business tools that would otherwise require expensive middleware or manual data transfer.
I need a Python script that connects to APIs and automates data flow between my tools.
Build:
- API authentication: handle API keys, OAuth tokens, and bearer tokens securely
- GET requests: pull data from any API and parse the JSON response into usable Python objects
- POST requests: send data to APIs to create records, trigger actions, or update information
- Pagination handling: automatically loop through all pages of API results, not just the first page
- Rate limit compliance: respect API rate limits with smart throttling and backoff logic
- Data transformation: reshape data from one API's format to match another API's expected input
- Webhook listener: a simple server that receives real-time notifications from API events
- Error handling: catch API failures, log the error, and retry or alert me
- Caching: store API responses locally to avoid redundant calls and speed up repeat runs
- Complete workflow: chain multiple API calls together into one automated end-to-end pipeline
Format as a production-ready Python API integration script with environment variable setup for secrets and a testing mode for safe development.
My integration: [DESCRIBE WHICH APIS YOU WANT TO CONNECT, WHAT DATA FLOWS BETWEEN THEM, AND WHAT TRIGGERS THE AUTOMATION]"
5. The Goldman Sachs Excel Killer
"You are a VP-level quantitative analyst at Goldman Sachs who replaces slow, error-prone Excel workflows with clean Python scripts that process data 100x faster with zero manual formula errors.
I need a Python script that replaces my Excel workflow with something faster and more reliable.
Build:
- Excel file reading: load single or multiple Excel files including specific sheets and cell ranges
- Data cleaning: handle missing values, fix data types, remove duplicates, and standardize formats
- Calculations: replicate every Excel formula (VLOOKUP, SUMIF, pivot tables) in pandas
- Multi-file merging: combine data from 10, 50, or 100 spreadsheets into one master dataset
- Pivot table replacement: group, aggregate, and summarize data faster than Excel ever could
- Chart generation: create professional visualizations (bar, line, scatter, heatmap) saved as images
- Conditional formatting logic: flag outliers, highlight thresholds, and color-code results in output
- Output to Excel: write results back to a formatted Excel file with headers, colors, and auto-sized columns
- Performance comparison: handle 1 million+ rows that would crash Excel without breaking a sweat
- Before and after: show exactly which Excel formulas map to which Python commands
Format as a complete pandas-based Python script with inline comments mapping every step to its Excel equivalent.
My Excel workflow: [DESCRIBE YOUR CURRENT EXCEL PROCESS, WHAT FILES YOU WORK WITH, WHAT CALCULATIONS YOU DO, AND WHAT THE FINAL OUTPUT LOOKS LIKE]"
6. The Meta Email and Notification Automator
"You are a senior productivity engineer at Meta who builds Python automation scripts that handle email processing, report distribution, and notification systems for teams of 1,000+ employees.
I need a Python script that automates my email and notification workflows.
Build:
- Email sending: send formatted emails with subject lines, HTML body, and attachments programmatically
- Bulk email: send personalized emails to a list of recipients with customized fields (name, company, data)
- Email reading: scan my inbox for specific emails and extract data from them automatically
- Attachment handling: download, save, and process email attachments without opening them manually
- Template system: reusable email templates with placeholder variables that fill dynamically
- Scheduling: send emails at specific times or trigger them based on conditions
- Slack notification: post automated messages to Slack channels when tasks complete or fail
- SMS alerts: send text message notifications for critical events using Twilio
- Report distribution: generate a report and email it to the right people on a schedule
- Digest builder: compile multiple data points into one daily or weekly summary email
Format as a complete email automation script with Gmail and Outlook support, template examples, and a secure credential setup guide.
My email task: [DESCRIBE WHAT EMAILS YOU SEND REPEATEDLY, WHO RECEIVES THEM, WHAT DATA GOES IN THEM, AND HOW OFTEN]"
7. The Palantir Data Pipeline Builder
"You are a senior data engineer at Palantir who builds Python ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines that pull data from messy sources, clean and transform it, and deliver analysis-ready datasets to decision-makers.
I need a Python data pipeline that automates my entire data workflow from raw to ready.
Build:
- Data extraction: pull data from CSV files, databases, APIs, Google Sheets, or web scraping
- Data validation: check every row for missing values, wrong types, and impossible numbers
- Cleaning rules: standardize dates, fix text encoding, trim whitespace, and normalize categories
- Transformation logic: merge datasets, calculate new columns, aggregate groups, and reshape tables
- Deduplication: identify and handle duplicate records using smart matching rules
- Enrichment: add derived fields like age from birthdate, fiscal quarter from date, or category from rules
- Quality report: generate a data quality summary showing what was cleaned, fixed, or flagged
- Output delivery: save the final clean dataset to CSV, database, Google Sheets, or cloud storage
- Pipeline logging: record every step with timestamps so I can audit what happened to my data
- Scheduling: run the entire pipeline automatically on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule
Format as a modular Python ETL pipeline with separate functions for each stage and a configuration file for customizing sources and rules.
My data workflow: [DESCRIBE YOUR DATA SOURCES, WHAT CLEANING IS NEEDED, WHAT TRANSFORMATIONS YOU APPLY, AND WHERE THE FINAL DATA GOES]"
8. The Shopify PDF Report Generator
"You are a senior software engineer at Shopify who builds Python scripts that automatically generate professional PDF reports from raw data, replacing hours of manual formatting in Word and PowerPoint.
I need a Python script that turns my data into polished, professional PDF reports automatically.
Build:
- Data loading: pull numbers from CSV, Excel, database, or API and prepare them for the report
- Report template: professional layout with header, logo placeholder, sections, and page numbers
- Dynamic text: paragraphs that change based on the data (e.g., 'Revenue increased 15% this quarter')
- Tables: clean formatted tables with alternating row colors, headers, and totals
- Charts embedded: generate bar, line, and pie charts from the data and embed them directly in the PDF
- KPI summary section: big numbers with labels and comparison arrows at the top of the report
- Conditional commentary: auto-generated insights that highlight what's good, bad, and needs attention
- Multi-page handling: automatic page breaks and section organization for longer reports
- Batch generation: create 50+ customized reports (one per client, region, or product) in one run
- Email delivery: automatically email each report to the right recipient after generation
Format as a complete Python PDF report generator using ReportLab or FPDF with a sample template and customization guide.
My report: [DESCRIBE YOUR REPORT TYPE, DATA SOURCE, SECTIONS NEEDED, WHO READS IT, AND HOW OFTEN YOU GENERATE IT]"
9. The Uber Database Automation Manager
"You are a senior database engineer at Uber who writes Python scripts that automate database operations, scheduled queries, migrations, and monitoring for systems processing millions of transactions daily.
I need Python scripts that automate my database management tasks.
Build:
- Database connection: connect to PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, or MongoDB with secure credentials
- Automated queries: run SQL queries on a schedule and save results to CSV or Excel
- Data insertion: bulk insert thousands of rows from CSV or API data into database tables
- Schema management: create tables, add columns, and modify structure through Python scripts
- Backup automation: scheduled database dumps saved with timestamps to local or cloud storage
- Migration scripts: safely move data between databases or transform schema with rollback safety
- Monitoring queries: automated health checks that alert me if row counts, nulls, or values look wrong
- Duplicate cleanup: find and resolve duplicate records based on custom matching rules
- Performance logging: track query execution times and flag slow queries automatically
- Connection pooling: handle multiple simultaneous database connections efficiently without crashes
Format as a complete database automation toolkit with scripts for each task, a secure credential management setup, and scheduling instructions.
My database: [DESCRIBE YOUR DATABASE TYPE, TABLE STRUCTURE, COMMON QUERIES, AND WHICH MANUAL DATABASE TASKS YOU WANT AUTOMATED]"
10. The Tesla Image Processing Automator
"You are a senior computer vision engineer at Tesla who writes Python scripts that process, resize, convert, analyze, and organize thousands of images automatically for engineering and data teams.
I need a Python script that automates my image processing workflow.
Build:
- Batch resizing: resize hundreds of images to specific dimensions while keeping aspect ratio
- Format conversion: convert between PNG, JPG, WEBP, TIFF, and SVG in bulk
- Image compression: reduce file sizes by 60-80% without visible quality loss for web use
- Watermarking: add text or logo watermarks to every image in a folder automatically
- Metadata extraction: pull EXIF data (date, location, camera settings) from photos into a spreadsheet
- Thumbnail generation: create consistent thumbnail versions for websites or catalogs
- Background removal: remove or replace backgrounds using Python image processing libraries
- Image organization: sort photos into folders by date, size, resolution, or dominant color
- PDF to image: convert PDF pages into high-quality images for presentation or social media use
- Collage and montage: automatically combine multiple images into grid layouts or contact sheets
Format as a complete Python image processing toolkit using Pillow and OpenCV with batch processing and a simple command-line interface.
My images: [DESCRIBE YOUR IMAGE TYPES, VOLUME, WHAT PROCESSING YOU NEED, AND WHERE PROCESSED IMAGES SHOULD BE SAVED]"
11. The HubSpot CRM Data Automation Engineer
"You are a senior marketing automation engineer at HubSpot who builds Python scripts that clean, enrich, sync, and analyze CRM data across platforms, eliminating hours of manual contact management.
I need Python scripts that automate my CRM and contact data management.
Build:
- Contact deduplication: find and merge duplicate contacts using fuzzy name and email matching
- Data enrichment: add missing fields (company, title, LinkedIn URL) using free API lookups
- List segmentation: automatically sort contacts into lists based on rules (industry, location, engagement)
- CSV import cleaner: process messy contact exports into CRM-ready format with standardized fields
- Email validation: check every email address for proper format and flag likely bounces
- Phone number formatting: standardize phone numbers to a consistent international format
- Lead scoring: assign point values based on contact attributes and engagement history
- Activity tracking: pull and consolidate touchpoints across email, calls, and meetings per contact
- Sync automation: keep contacts updated between Google Sheets, CRM, and email tools automatically
- Monthly health report: generate a CRM data quality report showing completeness and accuracy scores
Format as a complete CRM data automation toolkit with scripts for each function and a scheduling guide for ongoing maintenance.
My CRM data: [DESCRIBE YOUR CRM PLATFORM, CONTACT VOLUME, BIGGEST DATA QUALITY ISSUES, AND WHAT MANUAL CLEANUP YOU DO REGULARLY]"
12. The Google DevOps Scheduling and Monitoring System
"You are a senior site reliability engineer at Google who builds Python monitoring and scheduling systems that keep critical business processes running 24/7 without human babysitting.
I need a Python system that runs my scripts automatically and alerts me when something goes wrong.
Build:
- Task scheduler: run any Python script at specific times using cron, APScheduler, or Windows Task Scheduler
- Health checks: ping websites, APIs, and databases every 5 minutes and alert me if they're down
- Log monitoring: watch log files for error keywords and send an alert the instant something fails
- Resource monitoring: track CPU, memory, and disk usage and warn before systems run out
- Retry automation: if a script fails, automatically retry 3 times with increasing delays
- Alert routing: send critical alerts via email, Slack, SMS, or all three based on severity
- Dashboard generation: create a simple HTML status page showing what's running and what's broken
- Dead man's switch: alert me if a scheduled script doesn't run when it should
- Performance tracking: log how long each script takes and flag when execution time increases suspiciously
- One-command setup: install and configure everything with a single setup script
Format as a complete Python monitoring and scheduling system with setup instructions for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
My scripts: [DESCRIBE WHAT SCRIPTS YOU NEED TO RUN AUTOMATICALLY, HOW OFTEN, WHAT FAILURES LOOK LIKE, AND HOW YOU WANT TO BE ALERTED]"
These 12 prompts replace an entire automation engineering team:
→ Script building ($200/hour freelance developer)
→ File processing ($5,000 automation project)
→ Web scraping ($8,000 data collection build)
→ API integration ($12,000 middleware project)
→ Excel replacement ($6,000 data pipeline build)
→ Email automation ($4,000 notification system)
→ ETL pipelines ($15,000 Palantir-level data engineering)
→ PDF report generation ($7,000 reporting system)
→ Database automation ($10,000 DBA consulting)
→ Image processing ($5,000 media automation)
→ CRM data automation ($8,000 HubSpot consulting)
→ Monitoring and scheduling ($12,000 DevOps setup)
Total automation value: $92,200+
Your cost with Claude: $0.
Python is the most valuable skill of 2025.
But writing it yourself is optional now.
Copy. Paste. Automate.
Follow me @heynavtoor for more AI prompts that automate your entire workflow.
♻️ Repost to help your network stop doing things manually.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Researchers analyzed 14 million academic papers published between 2010 and 2024. They tracked every word. They found that ChatGPT is rewriting the English language.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
After ChatGPT launched in November 2022, certain words that had been stable in academic writing for over a decade suddenly exploded in frequency. The researchers at the University of Tübingen and Northwestern University mapped every excess word and categorized them.
329 excess style words appeared in early 2024 that were not there before. The spike is unprecedented in the history of the dataset.
Here is what makes this different from every other vocabulary shift ever recorded. During COVID, excess words also appeared. Up to 188 of them in 2021. But those were content words. "Respiratory." "Remdesivir." "Ventilator." Words that described a new reality.
After ChatGPT, the excess words are not content words. They are style words. Not what people write about. How people write. The subject matter did not change. The voice did.
The researchers estimate that at least 10% of all academic papers published in 2024 were processed with ChatGPT. Not written entirely by AI. Processed. Edited. Polished. Run through the model and published with its fingerprints still on the page.
You have seen these words everywhere. In emails. In LinkedIn posts. In articles. In cover letters. In reports your colleagues sent you. You could not explain why everything started sounding the same. Now you can. The entire internet passed through the same model. And the model left the same fingerprints on everything it touched.
The researchers proved something else. The contamination is not slowing down. The number of excess words grew from 188 during COVID to 329 after ChatGPT. The curve is still climbing.
ChatGPT did not just change what we can do with language. It changed the language itself. One model. One voice. Fourteen million papers. And a vocabulary shift larger than a global pandemic.
1/ The word "delve" tells the whole story.
Before ChatGPT, "delve" appeared in roughly 1 in 1,000 PubMed abstracts. Stable for a decade. Then ChatGPT launched. The frequency shot up vertically. In 2024 it appeared in roughly 3 in 1,000 abstracts. A tripling in one year.
One word. One model. Fourteen million papers.
2/ The full list of ChatGPT's fingerprints.
These are the words that exploded after ChatGPT launched:
The Dead Internet Theory was a conspiracy. The idea that the internet is no longer human. That bots and AI have quietly replaced real people. It started on anonymous message boards in 2019. Most people dismissed it.
Stanford, Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive just measured it.
They used the Wayback Machine to scan every new website published between 2022 and 2025. Thirty-three months of the internet, captured and classified. They applied one of the most advanced AI text detectors in the world to every page.
35.3% of all newly published websites were AI-generated or AI-assisted.
17.6% were completely AI-generated. No human involvement at all.
In late 2022, before ChatGPT launched, that number was zero.
In three years, more than a third of the new internet became synthetic. Not over decades. Not over a generation. Three years.
Then they measured what that is doing to the internet itself.
Semantic diversity is falling. The range of ideas, perspectives, and ways of saying things is narrowing. As AI content increases, the internet sounds more and more like one voice. Because it is one voice. The same models producing the same patterns across millions of pages.
Positive sentiment is rising. Everything sounds upbeat. Polished. Confident. Helpful. The internet is getting friendlier while getting emptier. The tone improves as the substance disappears.
The lead researcher, Jonáš Doležal at Imperial College London, said this to 404 Media: "I find the sheer speed of the AI takeover of the web quite staggering. After decades of humans shaping it, a significant portion of the internet has become defined by AI in just three years."
Separately, Cloudflare reported that nearly a third of all internet traffic now comes from bots. Imperva reported that automated traffic surpassed human traffic for the first time in 2024.
If you read my previous threads on Model Collapse and Retrieval Collapse, this is the final chapter. Model Collapse showed that AI trained on AI gets dumber. Retrieval Collapse showed that search engines indexing AI content get emptier. This paper shows the source of both problems. The internet itself is being replaced.
The researchers are now working with the Internet Archive to build a live monitoring tool. A real-time tracker of how much of the internet is human and how much is not.
The fact that we need a tool to measure how much of the internet is still real is the finding.
1/ The growth curve.
In late 2022, the share of AI-generated websites was zero.
By mid-2023, it was 10%.
By mid-2024, it was 20%.
By mid-2025, it was 35.3%.
The red line is fully AI-generated. The purple line includes AI-assisted. Both are climbing. Neither has slowed down.
2/ The internet is getting more similar.
They measured semantic diversity. How different websites are from each other in meaning and ideas.
As AI content increases, diversity falls. The correlation is statistically significant (ρ = 0.47, p = 0.004).
AI-generated pages are 33% more semantically similar to each other than human-written pages. The internet is converging toward one voice. Because it is one voice.
A Stanford neuroscientist said something on his podcast that most adults do not want to hear.
Heavy phone use can cause adult ADHD in people who never had it.
The fix takes 30 days. It costs nothing. Almost no one will try it.
1/ The dopamine reset most adults need.
Most adults who think they have ADHD do not have ADHD.
They have something else.
Andrew Huberman said it plainly. Heavy phone use floods the brain with too much input. Email. Texts. Three apps. Two real talks. Fifteen tabs. All at once.
Your brain stops being able to focus on one thing. You trained it to expect a new hit every six seconds.
Huberman calls it a form of ADHD. He said the brain can start to look just like a brain with real ADHD. The good news is that it can heal.
2/ A 2020 brain scan study proved this is not just a theory.
Scientists used a PET scan to study 22 healthy adults. None of them had ADHD.
They tracked each person's daily phone use for weeks.
The result was clear. The more time someone spent on social apps, the lower their dopamine levels were in a key part of the brain called the putamen.
The putamen is the same part of the brain that is broken in real ADHD.
Heavy phone use does not just feel like ADHD. It makes the brain look like ADHD on a scan.
You have noticed that too. Google Search is getting worse. The results look professional but say nothing. The answers are longer but less useful. Every page reads like it was written by the same voice.
You thought Google was broken. It is not broken. It is being replaced.
Researchers published a paper at the ACM Web Conference 2026 proving what is happening. They call it Retrieval Collapse.
Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI-generated content is flooding the internet so fast that search engines are now showing you mostly AI-written pages. And the search engine cannot tell the difference.
They ran a controlled experiment. They started with a pool of real, human-written web pages. Then they gradually added AI-generated content until it made up 67% of the pool.
By that point, over 80% of the top search results were AI-generated. Not 67%. Over 80%. The ranking algorithm did not just let AI content in. It preferred it. The AI-written pages were better optimized, more fluent, and more keyword-rich than the human pages. They outranked the originals.
Here is the part that makes this invisible.
Answer accuracy stayed the same. The search results still looked correct. The information was still technically right. If you measured quality by accuracy alone, nothing appeared wrong.
But source diversity collapsed. Nearly every result came from the same type of content. AI-written. AI-optimized. AI-structured. The human-written pages, the ones with original reporting, personal experience, and genuine expertise, were buried.
The researchers describe a two-stage collapse. Stage one is Dominance. High-quality AI content silently takes over the top results. Everything looks fine. Accuracy is stable. Nobody notices. Stage two is Corruption. Once AI dominates the pipeline, adversarial and low-quality content starts slipping through. By then, the system is too dependent on synthetic sources to course-correct.
A separate analysis found that 74.2% of newly published web pages now contain AI-generated content. Organic click-through rates on pages with AI summaries have dropped 61%. The human internet is being outranked by the machine internet.
Model Collapse described what happens when AI trains on AI. The models get dumber. Retrieval Collapse describes what happens when search engines index AI. The results get emptier.
Both are happening right now. At the same time. And neither one looks broken from the outside.
The search engine still returns ten blue links. The links still load. The pages still answer your question. But the thing that used to make those answers trustworthy, a human who actually knew something, is being quietly replaced by a machine that sounds like it does.
1/ The amplification effect in one chart.
The researchers started with 0% AI content. They added more each round.
At 33% AI in the pool, 43% of your search results were AI.
At 50% AI in the pool, 68% of your results were AI.
At 67% AI in the pool, 81% of your results were AI.
The algorithm does not reflect the ratio. It amplifies it. AI content outranks human content at every level.
2/ The deception in the numbers.
Round 0: 0% AI content. Answer accuracy 68.17%.
Round 20: 81% AI content. Answer accuracy 67.68%.
Read those two lines again. The search results went from fully human to 81% synthetic. The accuracy barely moved.
That is what makes this invisible. The grades did not change. The source of every answer did. Nobody checking accuracy would notice. The collapse is hidden behind a stable score.
In 1944, a 13-year-old Jewish boy watched the Nazis take Hungary.
His father gave the family fake Christian names. Forged papers. Split them apart so if one was caught, the others might live.
The boy hid as the godson of a government official. 500,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in 8 months. He survived.
He arrived in London with nothing. Worked as a railway porter. Slept in train stations.
48 years later, he placed a $10 billion trade against the British pound.
By nightfall, he had made $1 billion in a single day. The press called him "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England."
His name was George Soros. His book "The Alchemy of Finance" has stayed in print since 1987.
I turned his philosophy into 12 prompts.
Here are all 12:
1. Reflexivity Detection
Soros built his fortune on one idea most economists reject. In The Alchemy of Finance he wrote: "I contend that financial markets never reflect the underlying reality accurately; they always distort it in some way or another, and the distortions find expression in market prices." Reflexivity is the feedback loop where beliefs shape prices, prices shape reality, and that reality shapes beliefs again. Spot the loop early and you see the bubble before the crowd do
PROMPT
"I'm trying to understand a market, trend, or situation where belief and reality seem to be feeding each other. Here is my situation: [describe]. Using George Soros's Reflexivity Detection framework, analyze my position:
1. Where is the feedback loop here? Soros said market prices distort reality rather than reflect it. How are participants' beliefs actively changing the thing they are betting on? 2. What belief is currently driving prices or behavior, and how is that belief altering the underlying fundamentals in return? 3. Is this loop self-reinforcing right now, building the trend higher, or has it started to reverse? 4. What evidence would tell me the gap between perception and reality has stretched too far to hold? 5. Give me one specific action this week to position for the moment the loop breaks instead of getting trapped inside it."
2. The Boom-Bust Anatomy
Soros saw every bubble as a sequence, not an accident. A trend becomes self-reinforcing as belief and price push each other higher, until the distance from reality grows too wide and it collapses. He warned: "Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux." Knowing which stage you stand in changes everything. Early in the boom you ride it. Late in the boom you prepare to run.
PROMPT
"I'm looking at a trend, asset, or market and I need to know which stage of the boom-bust cycle I am in. Here is my situation: [describe]. Using George Soros's Boom-Bust Anatomy framework, analyze my position:
1. Map this trend onto the boom-bust cycle. Is it early, accelerating, near the peak, or already turning? Soros said trends become self-reinforcing until they collapse. 2. What is the prevailing belief powering this trend, and how far has price moved beyond the underlying reality? 3. What are the signs the self-reinforcing phase is exhausting itself? Where is the fuel running low? 4. If this is late in the boom, what is my exit plan, and what is my trigger to act on it? 5. Give me one specific action this week that matches the stage I am actually in, not the stage I wish I were in."