Lesson 8 of 8 · about 7 minutes
Keeping an Eye on Things
The assistant you are using today is not quite the one you will be using in six months. These are changed constantly, usually without an announcement. Sometimes a change makes yours better at your chore. Sometimes it makes it worse.
The idea
You do not need to follow the news about any of this. You need one small habit: a short, honest look at what your assistant actually did for you this week.
Three questions, once a week, in under five minutes:
- What did I hand it this week?
- How much did I have to fix?
- Is that more fixing or less fixing than a month ago?
The third question is the only one that needs you to have written anything down, which is why the one-line log in the graduation project matters more than it looks.
Signs the quality has slipped
- Answers get shorter and vaguer than they used to be.
- It forgets preferences it used to honor — the exclamation marks come back.
- It starts making things up in an area where it used to be solid.
- It ignores a rule that used to hold, such as “ask me before you guess.”
- You find yourself rewriting more of the result than you keep.
Any one of these on a single day means nothing at all. Machines and people both have odd days. The same thing three weeks running means something.
Update the instructions, or start fresh?
This is the decision you will face most often, and there is a clean rule for it.
Update your instructions when the answer is close but consistently off in the same direction — always too long, always too formal, always missing the date. Add one line to your card that names the problem: “Never open with a greeting.” One line at a time, so that you can tell which line did the work.
Start a fresh conversation when you have corrected the same thing twice and it keeps coming back. Long conversations drift. The assistant is carrying the whole history along with it, including your earlier failed attempts, and sometimes the quickest fix is a clean page. Open a new conversation, paste your saved card, and begin again from there.
Consider a different assistant only when a chore that worked well for months stops working and a fresh conversation with fresh instructions does not fix it. That is rare. Do not go shopping every time you have a bad afternoon.
The analogy
You are doing a small annual review, weekly.
You would not let a good employee go over one poor week. You also would not ignore three months of slipping and then act surprised. You notice, you write it down, you say something, and when the time comes you decide with a record in front of you instead of an impression.
One more thing that changes: you
Six months from now you will ask for harder things than you asked for in lesson 2, and you will spot weaknesses you could not see today. That is not the assistant getting worse. That is you getting better at reading its work — which is, in the end, the whole point of this course.
Try it now
About five minutes. Then five minutes a week, forever.
- Pick a day. Friday afternoon works for most people.
- Set a repeating weekly reminder on your phone: “AI review — 5 minutes.”
- Open a note on your phone and call it “AI log.”
- Write today’s line now, in this shape:
Aug 7 — newsletter draft. Fixed two sentences. Good.
- That is the entire habit. One line a week at minimum, one line a day if you use it daily. It takes less time to write than to think about.
If it goes sideways: if you miss a few weeks, do not start the log over. Add one line saying what you noticed in the meantime and carry on. A log with holes in it is worth far more than a tidy one you abandoned.
Plain-English recap
- These assistants change under you, quietly. Five minutes a week is enough to notice.
- Close but consistently off means update your instructions — one line at a time.
- Corrected twice and still wrong means start a fresh conversation with your saved card.
Next: the graduation project — one real chore, one month, one honest grade.