Accountability

After a foodservice liquidation, the survey scores came in. Same complaint, different names. The display piece mounted high on the wall. The scramble for help. Paying someone to take down what they already bought. Our invoice terms were clean. The buyer removes their lots. Onsite help is fee-based, not staff. High mounts and wall pieces were always going to be the buyer’s problem under the paper. I still kept catching recovery notes that apologized for the terms. “You shouldn’t have had to climb.” “You shouldn’t have had to pay for help.” That sounds kind. It also rewrites the deal after the gavel. ...

Today I rebuilt the routing rules for my AI agents: which model handles mechanical work, which handles hard reasoning, which validates the output before I see it. The setup looked rigorous. Every substantial piece of work got checked by a validator agent running at high effort on my most capable model. The critique that stopped me: the validator was the same model as the thing it was checking. Same model, same characteristic errors. When the producer and the checker share a mind, the check confirms the work is consistent with itself. It can’t see the errors that mind is inclined to make, because it’s inclined to make them too. ...