Make ChatGPT follow a checklist - Pathista help center

When you paste a whole checklist into a chat, the assistant has the whole list in front of it and decides for itself what to do next. Nothing outside the model checks that one item was done before the next begins. In a long conversation the list can be far from the latest message, and a model may drop, merge or reorder items.

The approaches combine. A numbered prompt is enough for five lines you can watch. A server is worth the setup when the process is long, repeated, branches or must leave a record.

• Number the items and ask for a confirmation of each one before the next. It is quick and suits a short list; it still relies on the assistant's own report.
• Put the list in saved instructions. A Claude project applies its instructions to every chat in the project, which keeps the list at hand. The list is still text for the assistant to read; the instructions do not by themselves record which step you are on.
• Ask for a todo list inside the chat. The assistant ticks the items itself, and the position lives in the conversation.
• Use a workflow server through MCP. The position, the variables and the history live on the server, the assistant is handed the current step only and a checklist item is closed only with evidence. Pathista is one; the steps below show how.

1. Create an account and connect your assistant: one link and one sign-in.
2. Write the checklist as a workflow: a step for each stage and, on a step, a checklist item for each thing that must be shown. Or start from a template and edit it.
3. Ask the assistant to start the workflow by name; in ChatGPT, name Pathista in the request. It receives the first step only.
4. The assistant does the work and closes each checklist item with evidence: what it checked, compared or produced. A bare “done” is refused.
5. It moves to the next step; where a step has more than one way out, it names the way it takes. You follow the run on its page and read the evidence in the log.

Pathista does not decide whether the evidence is true. It refuses an empty or generic one and keeps what the assistant wrote in the log, so you can check it. It runs only the workflows you wrote, and the assistant still has to be asked to start one.

The Customer interview synthesis template has 6 steps and 18 checklist items. Its steps, in the order they are written:

Words in code type, such as checkRound, are the template's own variables: small yes/no values or counters that the assistant sets during the run and that decide which way out of a step is open.

1. Collect the interviews
2. Pick the next interview
3. Interview card
4. Check the quotes against the sources
5. Themes
6. Insights and next steps

The checklist of the step “Check the quotes against the sources”. The assistant may leave the step only when every item is closed with evidence:

• The sample of at least three quotes from three different interviews was shown with number and place
• The user's result for each quote (match or mismatch) is written in the step summary
• Every mismatching quote was corrected or removed in a note
• quotesMatch and checkRound are set from the user's result

Open the template

• What is an MCP workflow?
• Claude Code release checklist: example workflow
• Customer interview synthesis: example workflow
• Pathista vs a prompt checklist
• Pathista vs Claude Projects and Skills
• Concepts: the words Pathista uses.
• Connect an assistant: one link and one sign-in.
• All guides