The five-word rule I gave AI

The best rule I ever gave my AI is five words long: stop and ask a person.

I wrote it after a proposal went to a customer promising an old version of my offer.

My offers file had the correct deliverables for my AI audit. The email sequence that follows my AI quiz described the same offer completely differently. I wrote those emails over a year ago, and the offer has changed since.

My Kelso second brain, the set of files my AI works from, held both versions. Claude had no way to tell which one was current, so it picked one and ran with it.

A person on my team would have spotted the old version straight away. AI treats every file it can see as equally true.

Think about how many old descriptions of your services are still sitting in files your AI can read. Every one of them is an answer it might give a customer.

So every file in my organisational brain now opens with three label lines: who owns it, whether it's a draft or approved, and the date someone last checked it.

Each fact lives in one file, and every other file points back to it instead of repeating it in its own words.

And there's a standing rule for when two files still disagree. Stop and ask a person.

Those five words turn a wrong answer to your customer into a quick question to you.