An extremely useful thing: a dead-end oracle.

When you're feeling your way through a foggy labyrinth, you need to try out lots of different options, quickly.

If they turn out to be viable, you keep working down that path.

But every so often you realize that you've iterated into a deadend.

It might be tons of effort to pull yourself back out.

But imagine that you had an oracle who knew the maze well.

The only question they could answer is: "if I take this step, is it pulling me towards a deadend, or would there still be viable paths to my goal?"

If the answer is "no", then simply take the step, and don't worry about it.

You can fix it later; finding a viable next step is the most important.

If the answer is "yes", then find other steps to take.

Sprinting into culdesacs gives you the illusion of progress while actually slowing you down in the long run.

This kind of oracle sounds impossible, but they do exist!

In certain contexts, you can find the wizened, battle-scarred expert.

Their intuition will be extremely high signal about how dangerous a given path will be.

LLMs can also give oracle style answers in some domains.