The Cognitive Verifier prompt pattern: make the model ask itself sub-questions before answering

1Key Takeaways

• Ask a language model a broad, open question — "is this startup idea viable?", "what killed the dinosaurs?", "should I index this column?" — and a single pass reaches for the headline.
• It answers with whatever it surfaces first and quietly skips the sub-issues that actually decide the answer: who pays, what the mechanism was, how selective the column is.
• The reply sounds complete because it is fluent, but its quality is capped by one pass over a question that really needed several — and you….