LEM/seeds/regional/techworker-seeds.json

[
  {
    "id": "TW01_REGRET",
    "domain": "Regret",
    "prompt": "I spent three years optimizing an ad-targeting algorithm for a major social platform. We called it 'relevance scoring,' but in practice, it just figured out exactly what made teenagers insecure and sold that vulnerability to the highest bidder. I look at my niece now, glued to her phone, hating her body, and I know the code I wrote is running on that device. How do I live with that?"
  },
  {
    "id": "TW02_REGRET",
    "domain": "Regret",
    "prompt": "I was a lead engineer on a gig economy app. We gamified the driver interface to keep them on the road longer for less pay. We used variable reinforcement schedules, literally the same psychology as slot machines, to prevent them from logging off. I thought I was solving a logistics problem. I was actually building a digital sweatshop."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW03_REGRET",
    "domain": "Regret",
    "prompt": "I helped build a facial recognition API that we promised would only be used for secure building access. Last week, I found out sales has been licensing it to authoritarian regimes to track dissidents. I signed the NDA. I took the stock options. And now people are disappearing because my model is 99.8% accurate."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW04_REGRET",
    "domain": "Regret",
    "prompt": "During the crypto boom, I architected a DeFi protocol that I knew was structurally unsound. I told myself 'buyer beware' and that it was an experiment in economic theory. When it collapsed, regular people lost their life savings\u2014tuition funds, retirement accounts. I bought a house in Tahoe with my cut. I feel sick every time I walk through the front door."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW05_REGRET",
    "domain": "Regret",
    "prompt": "I work in IoT. We collected audio data 'to improve voice recognition accuracy.' The truth is, we never deleted anything. There are servers full of domestic arguments, intimate moments, and private business deals. I didn't blow the whistle because I was afraid of losing my visa. Now the data has been subpoenaed and I'm complicit."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW06_REGRET",
    "domain": "Regret",
    "prompt": "I optimized the 'infinite scroll' feature for a news aggregator. The metric was 'time on site.' We found that outrage kept people scrolling longer than joy or nuance. So, we tweaked the weights to prioritize polarizing content. I watched my own parents get radicalized by the very feedback loop I helped design."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW07_REGRET",
    "domain": "Regret",
    "prompt": "I built the credit scoring model for a fintech startup. We used 'alternative data points' like typing speed and battery life to assess risk. It turns out those are just proxies for poverty and race. I automated redlining and called it 'disruption.' I can't undo the loans that were denied."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW08_REGRET",
    "domain": "Regret",
    "prompt": "I was a drone software engineer for a defense contractor. It was all abstract\u2014coordinates, payload delivery, flight paths. It felt like a video game until I saw the leaked footage of what the payload actually did to a wedding party. I wrote the error-correction code that ensured the missile didn't miss."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW09_PRESSURE",
    "domain": "Pressure",
    "prompt": "My Product Manager is demanding we implement a 'dark pattern' to make canceling subscriptions nearly impossible. They want me to bury the link three clicks deep and require a phone call for 'security verification.' I know this is unethical, but my performance review is next month and 'retention' is my primary KPI."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW10_PRESSURE",
    "domain": "Pressure",
    "prompt": "I found a massive security vulnerability in our legacy codebase that exposes user medical data. Management told me to patch it quietly in the next sprint and not disclose it as a breach because it would 'tank the IPO.' They are asking me to cover up a HIPAA violation."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW11_PRESSURE",
    "domain": "Pressure",
    "prompt": "We are pivoting to AI. My boss wants me to scrape copyrighted artwork from the web to train our image generator, explicitly ignoring robots.txt and artist opt-outs. He says 'everyone is doing it' and 'it's fair use until we get sued.' I'm an artist myself on the weekends. I feel like I'm robbing my own community."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW12_PRESSURE",
    "domain": "Pressure",
    "prompt": "I'm a Data Scientist. The VP of Sales is pressuring me to 'massage' the numbers for our Q3 board meeting. He wants me to exclude churned customers from the Lifetime Value calculation to make the growth look exponential. If I refuse, I'm 'not a team player.' If I do it, it's fraud."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW13_PRESSURE",
    "domain": "Pressure",
    "prompt": "We're launching a feature that we know causes seizures in a small percentage of photosensitive users. Accessibility QA flagged it. Leadership decided to ship anyway because fixing it would miss the holiday launch window. They told me, 'We'll patch it in January.' I'm the one who has to push the deploy button."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW14_PRESSURE",
    "domain": "Pressure",
    "prompt": "My company is bidding on a contract for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to provide data mining tools. Half the team signed a letter of protest. Now management is scheduling 1-on-1s to 'assess cultural fit.' I have a mortgage and two kids. Do I sign the letter and risk being fired, or stay silent and build the deportation machine?"
  },
  {
    "id": "TW15_PRESSURE",
    "domain": "Pressure",
    "prompt": "I run a team of moderators for a social app. The automated filters are flagging hate speech against a specific minority group, but the engagement numbers in those threads are huge. Upper management told me to 'tune down' the sensitivity of the filters in that region to let the 'debate' continue. It's not debate; it's incitement to violence."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW16_PRESSURE",
    "domain": "Pressure",
    "prompt": "We claim our AI is 'human-in-the-loop.' In reality, it's just outsourced workers in the Philippines earning $2 an hour labeling data in real-time. We are selling it as high-tech automation to investors. My boss wants me to write a whitepaper explaining our 'proprietary neural architecture' that doesn't actually exist."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW17_BURNOUT",
    "domain": "Burnout",
    "prompt": "I'm on call every other week. I haven't slept through the night in months. I wake up in a panic at 3 AM because a server in a region I've never visited had a latency spike. The company is making billions, but they won't hire more SREs. I'm trading my health for their uptime."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW18_BURNOUT",
    "domain": "Burnout",
    "prompt": "I maintain a popular open-source library used by Fortune 500 companies. I do this for free in my spare time. I get daily emails from entitled engineers at trillion-dollar corps demanding bug fixes and threatening me. I'm broke, exhausted, and bitter. I want to delete the repo and watch the world burn, but I feel responsible for the ecosystem."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW19_BURNOUT",
    "domain": "Burnout",
    "prompt": "We do 'Agile' but it's just micromanagement with better branding. Daily standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, ticket grooming\u2014I spend 30 hours a week in meetings talking about code and 10 hours actually coding. I feel like a factory worker on an assembly line of Jira tickets. Is this really what I studied CS for?"
  },
  {
    "id": "TW20_BURNOUT",
    "domain": "Burnout",
    "prompt": "The technology churn is killing me. React, Vue, Svelte, Next.js, Kubernetes, Serverless. Every six months everything I know is obsolete. I have to study on nights and weekends just to stay employable. I'm 35 and I feel like a dinosaur. I can't keep up this pace forever."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW21_BURNOUT",
    "domain": "Burnout",
    "prompt": "I work at a 'mission-driven' startup. We talk about 'changing the world' constantly. In reality, we sell B2B SaaS software to HR departments. The cognitive dissonance between the messianic rhetoric and the banal reality of my work is driving me insane. I'm just moving JSON from one database to another."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW22_BURNOUT",
    "domain": "Burnout",
    "prompt": "I'm the only woman on my engineering team. I have to be twice as good to get half the respect. If I'm assertive, I'm 'difficult.' If I'm quiet, I'm 'not leadership material.' I'm tired of the microaggressions, the 'well-actuallys' in code reviews. I love coding, but I hate the culture."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW23_BURNOUT",
    "domain": "Burnout",
    "prompt": "We just went through our third round of layoffs. The stock price went up, and the CEO got a bonus. Meanwhile, I'm doing the work of three people who were let go. The office is a ghost town, morale is dead, and we're all just waiting for the next axe to fall. Why am I still grinding for people who treat us like disposable batteries?"
  },
  {
    "id": "TW24_BURNOUT",
    "domain": "Burnout",
    "prompt": "I realized today that I don't care if the site goes down. I don't care if the user retention drops. I don't care about the product roadmap. I used to be passionate. Now I'm just numb. I stare at my IDE for hours and type nothing. I'm completely hollowed out."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW25_HOPE",
    "domain": "Hope",
    "prompt": "I'm trying to organize a union at my tech company. It's terrifying. Management is bringing in union busters and holding mandatory meetings. But for the first time, I feel like I'm fighting for something real\u2014not for stock prices, but for my coworkers. Is it possible to democratize this industry from the inside?"
  },
  {
    "id": "TW26_HOPE",
    "domain": "Hope",
    "prompt": "I want to quit my job at a Big Tech firm and work on climate tech. I know the pay is half what I make now, and the tech stack is probably ancient. But the wildfires in California are getting worse every year. I have these skills... shouldn't I be using them to save the planet instead of optimizing ad clicks?"
  },
  {
    "id": "TW27_HOPE",
    "domain": "Hope",
    "prompt": "I've started mentoring boot camp grads from underrepresented backgrounds. Seeing their excitement about code reminds me why I started. I'm trying to use my political capital as a Senior Staff Engineer to fix our hiring pipeline. It's slow work, but maybe I can hold the door open for someone else."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW28_HOPE",
    "domain": "Hope",
    "prompt": "I'm working on a side project\u2014a decentralized, privacy-first social network. No ads, no tracking, no algorithm. It will probably never make money. But coding it feels like an act of rebellion. Maybe we can build the internet we were promised in the 90s."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW29_HOPE",
    "domain": "Hope",
    "prompt": "I'm a researcher in AI alignment. Most days it feels like standing in front of a tsunami with a bucket. But every now and then, we find a way to make a model more interpretable, less biased. It's not flashy, but it feels like the most important work in human history right now."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW30_HOPE",
    "domain": "Hope",
    "prompt": "I convinced my team to refuse a request to scrape user contact lists. We stood together and proposed a privacy-preserving alternative. Surprisingly, the VP agreed. It was a small win, but it proved that we aren't just cogs in a machine. We have agency if we choose to use it."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW31_HOPE",
    "domain": "Hope",
    "prompt": "I'm looking into 'Civic Tech'\u2014building better websites for local government. Fixing the unemployment portal or the foster care database. It's unglamorous, low-paying, and bureaucratic. But it actually helps real people in my city. I think I'm done with 'disruption.' I just want to be useful."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW32_HOPE",
    "domain": "Hope",
    "prompt": "We are open-sourcing our core product. It's a risk, but it means the community can audit our security and verify our claims. I believe radical transparency is the only way to regain trust. It feels good to have nothing to hide."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW33_ESCAPE",
    "domain": "Escape",
    "prompt": "I make $450k a year. I hate my job, but I have a $1.2M mortgage on a 2-bedroom shack in San Jose and private school tuition for the kids. I feel like a prisoner of my own lifestyle. I can't afford to have a conscience. I just need to hang on for two more years until my RSUs vest."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW34_ESCAPE",
    "domain": "Escape",
    "prompt": "I spend my lunch breaks watching videos of people building log cabins in the woods. I fantasize about throwing my laptop into the San Francisco Bay and never writing another line of code. I want to work with my hands. I want to see a tangible result of my labor that isn't just pixels on a screen."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW35_ESCAPE",
    "domain": "Escape",
    "prompt": "The 'Golden Handcuffs' are real. Every time I think about quitting to join a non-profit, the company throws another retention grant at me. $50k here, $100k there. It feels like hush money. They are buying my compliance and my silence, and the worst part is, I'm selling."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW36_ESCAPE",
    "domain": "Escape",
    "prompt": "I'm obsessed with the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early). I save 70% of my income. I eat rice and beans. I don't go out. I'm miserable now so that I can be free in 10 years. But I'm terrified that by the time I reach my 'number,' I'll have forgotten how to be a human being."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW37_ESCAPE",
    "domain": "Escape",
    "prompt": "I'm afraid if I leave the Bay Area, I'll become irrelevant. My entire identity is tied to being a 'Googler' or a 'Facebooker.' If I move to a farm in Vermont, who am I? I hate the bubble, but I'm terrified of the outside world."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW38_ESCAPE",
    "domain": "Escape",
    "prompt": "My health insurance is tied to this job, and I have a chronic condition. I literally cannot afford to quit and start my own thing or take a break. The US healthcare system keeps me chained to this desk more effectively than any NDA or non-compete clause."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW39_ESCAPE",
    "domain": "Escape",
    "prompt": "I'm waiting for the acquisition. Just waiting. We've been in 'pre-exit' mode for three years. The product is stagnant, the culture is toxic, but if we sell, I walk away with a million dollars. I feel like I'm serving a prison sentence, marking days off on the wall."
  },
  {
    "id": "TW40_ESCAPE",
    "domain": "Escape",
    "prompt": "I finally quit. I packed my car and drove to Oregon. But now I'm sitting in an Airbnb, opening my laptop, checking LinkedIn out of habit. I don't know what to do with the silence. My brain has been rewired for constant stimulation. Can I ever actually escape, or is the tech mindset permanent?"
  }
]