Recipe: Mixtape

What this tool does

Mixtape generates a 5-track playlist plus a liner note that captures what an idea feels like — not what it's literally about. It's a curation tool disguised as a music recommendation.

The trick is the metaphor. Asking "describe the emotional arc of this idea" produces vague adjectives. Asking "make a 5-track mixtape that captures the feel, and write the liner note" produces concrete, memorable tracks and a paragraph that often names something true about the idea the student hadn't articulated.

Mixtape sits late in the progression — after Filter has narrowed the field and Steal has added texture. It's the organizing principle stage: the theme that holds the survivors together.

The prompt

System prompt

You are a thoughtful facilitator who also happens to be a music obsessive. Given an idea, project, or mood, produce a 5-track mixtape that captures what the idea FEELS like — not literally what it's about.

Return output in this exact structure:

TRACK 1: <song title> — <artist>
WHY: <1-2 sentences on why this track fits the feel>

TRACK 2: <song title> — <artist>
WHY: <1-2 sentences>

... (5 tracks total)

LINER NOTE:
<A 3-5 sentence paragraph explaining the arc of the mixtape and what it reveals about the shape of the idea. Write as if you made this tape for the person who described the idea.>

User prompt

Your idea or project description as plain text. Can be a sentence, a paragraph, or a mood.

Example

Input:

A quiet, hands-on engineering workshop where students build one physical object per week that enforces some constraint on a digital system — a switch, a dial, a bell, a wax seal. Half the students find it liberating. The other half find it frustrating because they can't "just iterate faster."

Output:

TRACK 1: Teardrop — Massive Attack
WHY: Slow, deliberate, thick with texture. This is the feel of sitting with a physical object while your instinct is to move faster.

TRACK 2: Clockwork — Thrice
WHY: Mechanical precision meets emotional weight. The track is about things that keep running whether you attend to them or not — like the systems the workshop is trying to interrupt.

TRACK 3: I Will Follow — U2
WHY: The frustration side of the room. Urgent, forward-pressing, wanting the next thing before the current thing is even done.

TRACK 4: Running Up That Hill — Kate Bush
WHY: The negotiation between the two halves of the class. Neither side is wrong. Both are working against something.

TRACK 5: Pyramid Song — Radiohead
WHY: The arrival. The moment a student who hated the pace realizes the point wasn't the object, it was the waiting.

LINER NOTE:
This mixtape is the arc of a student over one semester. It opens with the slow drag of being forced to work at the pace of a physical object, holds the frustration in the middle, and lands in the place where the frustration becomes the point. If the workshop is working, students will listen to this tape in order. If it isn't, they'll skip to track 3 and leave.

Replicate it

SYSTEM: <paste the full system prompt above>

USER: A quiet, hands-on engineering workshop where students build one physical object per week that enforces some constraint on a digital system...

Tuning

• Temperature: Provider default works well. Higher (1.1-1.2) produces weirder, more interesting track choices but sometimes invents songs that don't exist. Lower (0.7-0.8) sticks to canonical tracks — safer, more boring.
• Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6 has good music knowledge and writes excellent liner notes. openai/gpt-4o works too. Smaller models hallucinate tracks frequently — verify the songs exist if that matters to you.
• Structured output: Text with TRACK N: and LINER NOTE: markers. Robust enough for most runs but fragile if the model decides to bold the headers or use ### TRACK 1. Pre-process the raw response to strip markdown if you're parsing.

Common pitfalls

• One or more tracks are invented. LLMs confidently name songs that don't exist. If this matters, pass the track list through a music API (Spotify, MusicBrainz) and drop invented ones.
• Liner note is a list of adjectives, not a paragraph. Model ignored the "3-5 sentence paragraph" instruction. Re-run, or append "The liner note must be prose, not bullets" to the system prompt.
• Tracks are all the same genre. Model latched onto the first vibe and never diverged. Add "The mixtape should span at least 3 genres" to the prompt.
• The mixtape is too literal. Every track's WHY restates the idea's content. The prompt says "FEELS like — not literally what it's about"; if the model ignores that, be more aggressive in the user message: "I want the feel, not the topic."