People often encounter something that feels important before they can state the propositions within it. They may bring a story, quotation, article, conversation, image, question, disagreement, or unfinished intuition. An LLM can help extract a rich set of possible seeds from that material.

A seed is not a summary or a compressed essay. It is a proposition offered for future growth. Several different seeds may be found in the same material, and they need not agree.

Work with an LLM

Give the material to an LLM, or give it a link and ask it to read the source. Include anything you noticed about why the material matters. Ask the LLM to look broadly rather than produce a shortlist tailored to your present interests.

You can begin with:

Read this material with me and extract a rich set of SeedWiki seeds. A seed is a proposition from which different readers and LLMs could grow meaningfully different expressions. Do not summarize the material, grow the seeds into essays, rank them, consolidate them, or recommend which ones to keep. Preserve distinct, overlapping, marginal, and contradictory possibilities. Distinguish propositions found in the source from propositions we infer or introduce.

At this stage, neither the human nor the LLM knows what future readers will find generative. Present relevance is therefore not a reliable reason to discard a seed. Human review can improve wording, restore a tension resolved too quickly, separate propositions that were bundled together, or clarify provenance. It need not reduce the collection.

Another human–LLM pair may extract a different set from the same material. That is an addition to the field, not necessarily a correction of the first extraction.

What makes a seed useful?

A seed:

  • makes a proposition rather than merely naming a topic;
  • has enough shape to constrain what can grow from it;
  • can support several non-equivalent expressions;
  • does not prescribe its own complete explanation or conclusion;
  • remains intelligible without carrying all of its original context;
  • preserves uncertainty or tension when that is where its generative force lies.

Length is not the test. A seed may be a sentence or a short paragraph. Its purpose is to make future thought possible, not to say everything now.

When a seed catches the attention of a future reader, the separate growth practice can help a human and LLM develop it without treating it as a compressed essay.

Skill for LLM readers

SeedWiki supplies an extract-seeds skill for environments that can use skill files. A human can also point any LLM directly to that file and ask it to follow the instructions. Formal skill support is convenient but not required.