🏆 WEEKLY COMP #10: THE DIAGNOSTICIAN 🏆

Matthew Creamer

2d • 💰 Competitions

🎟️ PRIZE: FREE SEAT IN THE LYCEUM 🎟️

Pick your cohort. Technical, Business, or Creator. Your call.

📋 THE CHALLENGE

Build a folder-based AI diagnostician that reads something broken and tells you WHY it's broken.

Not how to fix it. Why it failed.

This week's deliverable is one diagnostician folder that someone could drop into a Claude project and use to figure out why something in their world isn't working.

🎯PICK YOUR DOMAIN

The domain is yours. Pick something specific. Pick a failure you've actually seen happen.

A few sparks to get you thinking:

- 📉 Why a landing page isn't converting

- 📧 Why cold emails to a specific buyer aren't getting replies

- 📋 Why a product spec keeps getting pushed back by engineering

- 📄 Why a resume isn't getting callbacks in a specific industry

- 🚪 Why users drop off at one step of an onboarding flow

- 💸 Why a pricing page isn't converting trials

- 🎥 Why a YouTube video underperformed the channel average

- 🤝 Why a sales deal stalled after the demo

- 📱 Why an app's retention craters in week two

The more specific, the better. "Diagnoses marketing problems" is too broad. "Diagnoses why cold emails to enterprise IT buyers get opened but never answered" is right.

🗂️THE METHODOLOGY

If this is your first comp, welcome. Here's what you need to know:

This week (and every week) you're learning interpretable context methodology. Folders as architecture. Each file does one job well.

Your diagnostician is a folder with five things:

- 📄 identity.md (who the diagnostician is, what they diagnose)

- 📐 rules.md (how they diagnose: what they look at, how they separate cause from symptom)

- 💬 examples.md (2-3 example diagnoses showing the reasoning)

- 📚 reference/ (common failure modes, diagnostic frameworks, benchmarks)

- 📖 README.md (how to use it, what to feed it)

Drop the folder into a Claude project. Claude becomes the diagnostician. Reusable. Shareable. Portable.

🔥 THE ANGLE THIS WEEK

A diagnostician is NOT an editor.

Last comp was The Editor. That one critiques craft. It looks at a draft and says "this part is weak, go fix it."

This is different. The diagnostician works backward from a failure. Something already didn't work in the real world. The job is to figure out the cause.

Three things separate a real diagnosis from a critique:

1. It names ONE primary cause. A list of twelve issues is a symptom inventory, not a diagnosis. Rank them or you haven't diagnosed anything.

2. It shows its reasoning. How did it reach that conclusion? What in the artifact points there?

3. It separates cause from symptom. "Your headline is vague" is a symptom. "You're writing for a buyer who already knows the category, but your traffic comes from people who've never heard of it" is a cause.

A doctor doesn't hand you a rewritten body. They tell you what's wrong and how they know. That's the job. 💪

💼 WHY THIS LANDS ON YOUR RESUME

Diagnosis is the skill companies pay consultants for. Anyone can list what's wrong. Very few people can tell you which thing is actually killing you.

"I built a diagnostician that identifies why [thing] fails in [specific context]" is a portfolio piece that demonstrates judgment, domain expertise, and systems thinking all at once. 🚀

Win or lose, you walk out with something you'd be proud to link from your LinkedIn.

📐THE BAR

Feed your diagnostician something broken. It should tell you the real reason it broke, show you how it got there, and stop.

If the output is a checklist of everything wrong, you built an audit tool.

If the output rewrites the thing, you built an editor.

If the output jumps straight to "try this instead," you built a consultant.

None of those are the assignment.

📝 HOW TO SUBMIT

Drop a public GitHub repo link in the comments. Plus 2-3 sentences on what your diagnostician diagnoses and who it's for.

⚖️ JUDGING

Jake, Matt, and the mods, scored against a full rubric. Four things we're looking at:

✅ Does it actually diagnose? Root cause, not symptom list, not prescription.

✅ Is the domain specific enough to be useful?

✅ Is the methodology clean? Each file does one job well.

✅ README quality. Can a stranger figure this out?

🎟️ WHO CAN ENTER

Premium and VIP members only. No exceptions.

🆓 Free members watching this thinking "I could win that"? You're probably right. This week's prize is a free Lyceum seat. That's the same program biz owners pay full price to access. Upgrade to Premium and you're in the running.

📅 DATES

⏰ Submit by: Saturday, August 8th, 11:59 PM EST

🎉 Winner announced: Saturday, August 15th

Every entrant gets individual feedback this round, not just the winner. That's why we moved to the longer judging window.

🚀 One last thing.

Week 9 was The Editor. This week is The Diagnostician. Different muscle, same methodology.

Editors make work better. Diagnosticians tell you why it failed. The second one is rarer and worth more.

LFG 🚀

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🏆 WEEKLY COMP #10: THE DIAGNOSTICIAN 🏆