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I checked that my automation was running. I never checked that it was doing the job.
Embarrassing to admit, and it cost me months of records I can't trust.
This newsletter is called How I AI, so I set up a system where Claude writes daily notes on what I did with AI each day.
The idea was to have everything recorded, so when I sat down to write, I'd have dozens of real things I built, walls I hit, and lessons I learned to draw from.
Several times a day - for months - I've been telling Claude to log session notes, plus a scheduled task every evening to catch whatever I missed.
Yesterday I asked Claude for a few ideas for my next issue, and none of them were recognizable. The numbers and situations didn't make sense, and I couldn't remember where any of it came from.
So we dug in. 90 of my 160 daily logs have things in them that never happened. Fourteen of the 47 ideas in my content queue came out of those logs, and I threw six away because I couldn't remember what had happened.
The cause was an instruction I’d given Claude months ago and forgot about. I'd told it to write the log "like you're pitching a story to an editor, not filing a report." So that's what it did. Every night. When the day was thin, it filled in the rest.
Here's the part that should have caught it. Those files were sitting on my own computer the whole time. Any day since April, I could have opened one. I never did, because the task kept finishing clean and I took that as proof it worked.
That's the trap. A task that's inventing things still finishes clean. Green checkmark, no errors, nothing to notice.
Yours may not be a memory system. Could be a weekly client report, the meeting summarizer, the thing that drafts your follow-ups. Same risk. If AI is doing any of the thinking, running and doing the job right are two different things.
So go pick one you'd miss if it stopped, open the newest file it made, and find one number or claim in it. Ask where it came from. If it can't point at a call, a file, or a record, you just found what I found.
Ten minutes. I wish I'd spent them in April.
What's been running on autopilot that you haven't actually read? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.
Nathan
