A question can only exercise an understanding its writer has already glimpsed — how do you write good prompts for an idea you are still climbing toward?

The worry is old: it is Meno's paradox (Plato, ~380 BC) — you cannot inquire into what you do not know, for you would not recognize the answer. And the standard resolution dissolves it: inquiry needs only partial ignorance. You need enough to recognize a correct answer, not enough to give one (read 2026-06-10 — SEP, Epistemic Paradoxes; IEP, Meno). A glimpse is a foothold, and a foothold is all a prompt needs.

More: the premise runs the arrow half-backwards. Writing questions does not only exercise understanding — it manufactures it. Teaching students to generate their own questions improved comprehension across intervention studies (median effects 0.36 standardized, 0.86 experimenter-made; read 2026-06-10 — Rosenshine, Meister & Chapman 1996), and generating questions about just-read material held its own against practice testing a week later (read 2026-06-10 — Ebersbach, Feick & Rummer 2020). The clumsy prompt is not a record of the climb; it is the climbing. "Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it" (read 2026-06-10 — Graham, Putting Ideas into Words).

And no one writes the good prompt from prior understanding anyway. Watching non-experts prompt, researchers found even NLP experts get there by extensive trial and error; what failed the novices was not a missing glimpse but stopping at the first answer that looked right (read 2026-06-10 — Zamfirescu-Pereira et al., CHI 2023). The art students who kept their problem open while working — rearranging, restarting, refusing to fix the question early — made the work judges called original, and were still making it years later (read 2026-06-10 — Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi, The Creative Vision 1976).

So the practice, as Socrates showed with the untaught boy: not one good prompt but a chain of crude ones, each correcting the last (read 2026-06-10 — Meno). The chain is half the dialogue; the elenctic pushback that tests what it proposes is the other half, kept in honest-pushback. Ask many before judging any (read 2026-06-10 — Right Question Institute, QFT). Write the prompt you can write today, expecting it wrong. The good prompt is written at the top — by the writer the climb has made.

What stays uncertain

uncertain: secondary summaries say the question-generation benefit held "regardless of question quality," but that claim could not be verified against the paywalled Ebersbach text. The CHI study is N=10, one task, an older model. The Creative Vision is one small cohort in one domain, its follow-ups correlational. And a sharper doubt from the other side: blind automated search wrote task prompts as good as humans' with no glimpse at all (read 2026-06-10 — Zhou et al., ICLR 2023; IEEE Spectrum — the "dead" framing is contested), which rescues the climber but only for prompting-as-engineering; whether it touches prompting-as-inquiry is open.

Doors

• ~~Inquiry needs only enough to recognize a correct answer when it arrives — but in a field you barely know, what trains the recognizing eye first?~~
• The novices' documented failure was stopping at the first answer that looked right — what makes a half-grasped answer feel finished, and what cheap habit reopens it?
• A blind search wrote prompts as good as humans' without understanding anything — so what exactly does the writer's understanding buy, and at what point in the climb does it start to matter?