Battle-Tested Research Prompts

An elegant, curated gallery of research prompts with proven yield — the actual prompts (and full transcripts) that frontier AI labs released alongside significant, verified research results.

Yield criteria (firm)

All four requirements must hold for a prompt to enter this gallery:

1. The prompt is available — released verbatim by its source (PDF, dataset, or web page) and collected here as a copy-paste-runnable .md file.
2. It is related to a research task — mathematics, science, or engineering discovery, not a demo or toy.
3. It is battle-tested — actually used in the run that produced the result, not a post-hoc reconstruction.
4. It produced significant yield in its field — a result independently validated by publication in a peer-reviewed venue, wet-lab confirmation, formal verification (e.g. Lean), or expert review. The yield is stated concretely in every entry README.

Never include a prompt without a proven yield.

Usability requirement: the published prompt must carry the causal weight of the yield. Entries whose published prompts are one-liners (or otherwise insubstantial) while the actual instructions lived in undisclosed harness system prompts, skills, or project instructions are unusable and are excluded — this repository collects useful prompts, not exercises in reverse-engineering hidden context. Every entry README still discloses whatever user-authored context remains unpublished (harness configs, tool schemas) so yields are never overstated.

Rejected entries

Candidate	Rejected because
Anthropic — Riemann zeta 67.2% critical-line bound (Aug 10, 2026)	Has hidden, undiscoverable user prompts: the published human inputs are one-liners ("Take a real stab at the Riemann hypothesis", "Keep going / Believe in yourself"); the yield derives from an unreleased research model's hidden harness system prompt, skills, and CLAUDE.md-style instructions. Unusable — deleted.
Anthropic — NMR / LC-MS analytical-chemistry one-liners (Aug 18, 2026)	Same character: two-sentence prompts whose yield is attributable to the unpublished Claude Science harness and skills. Deleted from the protein-design entry.

The Gallery

OpenAI

Entry	Field	Yield	Date
Cycle Double Cover Conjecture	Graph theory	Complete proof of the CDC conjecture (all finite bridgeless loopless multigraphs), via GPT 5.6 Sol Ultra with 64-agent adversarial search	2026
First Proof? — solve/verify/refine templates	Competition mathematics	Programmatic pipeline producing model-verified solutions to 1stproof.org problems (3/4 correct on the BSS seed idea for Problem #6)	Feb 2026

Anthropic

Entry	Field	Yield	Date
De novo protein binder design campaign	Computational biology	Wet-lab-confirmed binders against 14/15 targets; 22–35% hit rates vs. 10–15% human baseline; state-of-the-art affinities. ~30k-token autonomous campaign prompt + kickoff messages	Aug 18, 2026

Google DeepMind / Google Research

Entry	Field	Yield	Date
Co-Scientist agent prompts & research goals	Biomedical hypothesis generation	Nature-published multi-agent system; lab-validated AML repurposing (KIRA6), anti-fibrotic targets (91% response blockade), and re-discovery of unpublished cf-PICI mechanism	May 19, 2026

Conventions

• Hard requirement: every entry contains one or more pure prompt files (named prompt*.md) whose entire content is the prompt — no commentary, no headers, no provenance notes. Copy the file's full content and run it verbatim. Supporting material (provenance, analysis, transcripts, context) lives in separate files (README.md, *-context.md, transcript.md, etc.).
• Each entry lives in prompts/<lab>-<entry>/ (flat — no per-company nesting) with:
  • README.md — metadata table (lab, model, field, yield, date, sources) and analysis of the prompt techniques that worked.
  • prompt*.md — the verbatim, runnable prompt(s).
  • Full transcripts where released.
• Extraction provenance is documented in the entry README or context file; the original source is always linked and authoritative.