Student guide: Reduce the Precision

Use one fictional rewrite card. Underline the task, then mark the details that are necessary and those that are more exact than the task requires.

1. State the actual goal in one sentence.
2. For each exact detail, ask whether a role, range, category, region, or fictional substitute would still support the goal—and whether you are authorized to use the information for this purpose.
3. Sort details into retain, generalize, replace with a placeholder, verify first, keep out, or handle elsewhere.
4. Write a useful but less precise request. Keep exact values in the finished artifact only when an authorized person supplies or confirms them.
5. Compare it with the original: what did you retain, remove, and deliberately not guess? Name one boundary that rewriting cannot solve.

Do not use a real person’s information. Reducing precision does not make every task appropriate for a general chat tool.

Completion check: save the fictional original, safer rewrite, one retained detail, one removed detail, and one human or policy boundary in the Lab Notebook.

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Source: labs/reduce-the-precision/companions/student-step-by-step.md