“Did I hallucinate that?”
I asked Maxine how the edits were coming. She had no idea what I was talking about.
Maxine is what I call ChatGPT. She edits a lot of my content. Claude is my strategic thought partner. Between the two of them plus a few Grok Bots, my agent team manages a lot of work in a day.
I had given those edits to Claude.
So, back to my hallucination question. I guess the answer is… sort of? The conversation happened. I just had it with someone else.
This happens to me all the time. I remember the work. I remember deciding it. I can't remember which chat window it's sitting in.
Then there was the schedule. Claude and I started at five one morning and built it over the day. He suggested starting a new chat for the execution work and even wrote the handoff. Very thoughtful, that Claude.
The schedule didn't make the trip.
So there I was, scrolling back through the first conversation, trying to prove the work had actually happened. I wasn't looking for a file. I was looking for evidence I hadn't made the whole thing up.
I'd asked some version of that question at least three times that day. AI is supposed to be the one that hallucinates. Apparently that job had been reassigned to me.
That's the part that bugs me. When something goes missing, my first suspect is my own memory. Maxine didn't say, “Try Claude.” The new chat didn't say, “Heads up, I don't have the schedule.” Nothing tells you what's missing, so you assume it's you.
I use these tools to do real work. I know they have limits. I need to see where those limits are before I rely on an answer.
Every chat makes it feel like the work is safely in there somewhere. And it is, the way something is safely in the back of a drawer. You own it. Good luck finding it when you need it.
This is the gap I keep coming back to, and naming it is the first of my 4 Moves: Surface what's real. What was real for me was simple. I had no single place that said what I'd assigned and who had it.
My paper tray is more honest. Paper goes in, nothing comes back out, and eventually it all gets shredded. It never pretends it knows where anything is.
It's not realistic to have my whole life in one app. I just need to know what job each surface is doing.
So we fixed it. Assignments don't live in chats anymore. We moved the business into Jira and Confluence. Every assignment lives in one place, and it says who has it. My agent team reads from there and can see my calendar. Nobody needs a handoff to tell them the plan, and I don't have to remember who has what.
You don't need Jira for this. You need one list of what you've handed off, and to whom.
If this sounds familiar, start with Surface. Take one piece of work that's moving today. A decision from a meeting. A task you gave someone. A plan from a chat. Write down where it lives and who has it. If it's an AI assistant, ask it to show you what it's working from before you let it run.
You can do that without spending the afternoon reorganizing every tool you own. The test is whether this one piece of work arrives intact.
If you'd like to learn more, sign up for the free 4 Moves Starter Kit. It starts with the 4 Moves Starter Guide, and free tools arrive by email over the next two weeks.
And yes, it's real. You won't have to scroll back through anything to prove it.