The Show-Your-Work Habit

You ask Cowork to "clean up my inbox: archive everything that's resolved, label the rest." It comes back: "Done. Archived 64 threads, labeled 31." You feel lighter for about four seconds. Then it lands that you have no idea which 64 threads just vanished, and one was the contract thread you needed open this afternoon.

Nothing here malfunctioned. Cowork did exactly what you asked, and made a judgment call about which threads counted as resolved. You just never saw the call before it became sixty-four actions you can't easily take back.

An earlier series taught you to read the tool calls after Cowork acts. That's the right reflex for answers. But for actions that change something in the real world (archiving mail, overwriting a file, reassigning tickets), reading after the fact is reading the receipt. The move is to see the plan before it runs.

The fix is one sentence you add to the ask.

#Answers are cheap to be wrong. Actions aren't.

When Cowork writes a summary and gets it wrong, you notice, correct it, move on. The cost of a bad answer is one more turn.