Working With Long Documents: Interrogate, Don't Summarize

⚠️ Version note. Upload buttons and context limits change. The method — interrogate, don't summarise — does not. Last checked: 25 July 2026.

What you'll have at the end

• One real long document (a report, paper, contract, or manual) analysed, not just summarised
• A set of interrogation questions you can reuse on any document
• Its key claims cross-examined against the source, so you trust the answer

Prerequisite

• AI-02 — How to Use Claude (or any AI that accepts file uploads).
• AI-07 — Hallucination Hunting. You'll verify what the model says against the document itself.

Why "summarise this" is the wrong first move

Ask AI to "summarise" a 40-page report and you get a bland paragraph that flattens everything to the same importance and quietly drops the one detail you needed. Worse, you can't tell what it left out.

A document is not a thing to compress — it's a thing to question. The skill is turning the AI into a research assistant you cross-examine, not a shrink-ray. You stay in charge of what matters; it does the fetching.