The Probe-Then-Build Loop

You ask Cowork to "build me a spreadsheet of every open deal, grouped by region, with the expected close date and dollar value."

It works for a minute and hands you a clean table: twelve regions, neat columns, totals at the bottom. It looks like exactly what you asked for.

Then you notice "EMEA" and "Europe" sit there as two separate regions. Several close dates don't match the CRM. And the one deal you were actually worried about isn't in the table at all, because its stage field was blank and Cowork quietly skipped it.

The table wasn't wrong because Cowork is careless. It was wrong because you asked it to build before either of you had looked at what was in the data.

The fix is a five-second habit: probe first.

#The build-first reflex

When you have a finished thing in your head (a report, a spreadsheet, a summary), you describe the finished thing. But that request forces Cowork to make a hundred small decisions about data it hasn't inspected yet: which field is the close date, what the regions are called, what to do with the blanks.