My AI Was Assigning Me Homework

Week ending August 14. Written up from the build log.

My AI had been assigning me homework.

Part of Red's job is reading back through my work sessions and pulling out anything I committed to. A promise to call someone back. A deadline another person is waiting on. That's the point of it.

The trouble was everything else it pulled out. Every unfinished follow-up from a technical session turned into a task waiting for me to confirm. A cleanup someone could do someday. A check that might be nice before a launch. A note to decide whether to do something, with no deadline attached.

This week we looked at where those tasks had ended up. More than half had been cancelled. Only about one in seven had been marked done. A single session had filed 82 of them.

Together, they had turned my list into a record of the AI thinking out loud, with me signing off on every thought.

So I asked for it to stop. Now that process can only add a task for me if it's still unfinished and it's real: I said I would do it, someone outside the session is waiting on it, or there's a real outside deadline. Everything else goes to a separate list that stays out of my way. It adds no more than three per session.

For most technical sessions, the expected number of new tasks for me is now zero.