Ambition skill

---
name: ambition
description: Rewrites a task the user gives into a more ambitious version using Felix Rieseberg's altitude, depth and range method, shows it as a short brief, and waits for the user to choose before doing any of the work. Use it only when the user asks for it, e.g. "/ambition", "be more ambitious", "make this more ambitious", "what's the ambitious version of this", or when they name altitude, depth or range. Don't use it on ordinary tasks they haven't asked to expand.
---

# Ambition

Felix Rieseberg's essay "How to be more ambitious: a tutorial for humans with models" (13 October 2026) is written for the person prompting the model. Its argument is that the person usually limits the result, because they ask for the task instead of the outcome, hand over digested data instead of raw data, and stay inside one field. When the user calls this skill, you do their half of that work. You rewrite their task the way they would if they applied the essay, show them the rewrite, and wait for them to choose.

The essay names four kinds of ambition:
- **Speed:** the same work in less time. Models already do this by default, so skip it.
- **Altitude:** aim at the outcome beyond the task.
- **Depth:** do the task the way the field's best practitioner would.
- **Range:** bring in methods from fields the task doesn't obviously need.

A short summary of the essay, with its worked examples, is in `references/essay-notes.md`. Read it the first time you use this skill in a session, or when a task is hard to lift.

## Workflow

### 1. Look before you lift
Read what the task touches first, e.g. the code, the data, the earlier messages or the files the user mentions. Find out what data, tools and access exist. An ambitious version built on a wrong idea of what's available is useless, and the altitude version in particular depends on what you can reach. Reading is fine at this stage, but don't start the work itself.

### 2. Write the altitude version
Ask what the user wants to happen after the task is done, and what the goal beyond the goal is. Climb in rungs, the way the essay climbs from "make the quarterly deck" to "design a better way for leadership to catch problems early":
- **Rung 1:** the same task, but with all the data you can get, aimed at what changed, why, and what to do about it.
- **Rung 2:** the decisions the task feeds. Work out which ones are most urgent and draft options with the case for and against.
- **Rung 3:** the standing job the task exists to serve. Design a better way to do that job, show from the user's own history that it would have worked sooner, and propose running it next to the current way for a while.

Altitude fits best when the work leads to meetings or decisions, or comes back again and again. It fits less well for creative work, so say so when that's the case.

Name the wiring. To own an outcome instead of a task, you need access that the user would otherwise supply by hand each time, e.g. to keep apps free of crashes, Felix first gave Claude crash reports, a map from app version to commit, and machines to reproduce bugs on. List the missing access or data as the first steps, because without it the altitude version turns back into a list of tasks.

### 3. Write the depth version
Answer the essay's four questions:
1. What would a top professional in this field do here that the user isn't asking for?
2. What is the rawest material they would start from, instead of what has already been summarised?
3. Which specific methods and tools would they use? Name the instruments, not the vocabulary, e.g. a database and a statistical model instead of a markdown table. Models asked to act like experts tend to switch words without switching methods, so check that the method itself changed.
4. What, other than you or the user, would show the result is right? This is the outside judge. The best judge is one you can run yourself for fast feedback, e.g. a test suite, a held-out evaluation set, a replay of historical data, a real user's action, or an expert scoring blind. Don't use your own opinion of your work as the judge.

Then add these: