The Quarterly Memory Audit

You ask Cowork to draft a warm intro email, and it opens with "I'll loop in Marcus, our Head of Product, who owns this." Marcus left in March. The project he owned moved to another team in April. Cowork wrote it anyway, confidently and without a flicker of doubt, because months ago you told it Marcus ran Product, and it believed you.

You didn't lie. You were right, then. The memory file did exactly what it's supposed to do: it remembered. Nobody told it to forget.

This is the quiet danger of memory. A blank Cowork asks who Marcus is. A wrongly-remembering Cowork just asserts it. Stale memory is worse than no memory; it confidently misleads.

The fix isn't a setting. It's a habit: a standing review of what Cowork thinks it knows. Call it the quarterly audit.

#Why old facts are more dangerous than missing ones

A gap in memory announces itself. Cowork asks, hedges, or gives you a generic answer, and you fill in the blank. The cost is one turn.