I'm pretty proud of our household project management setup. I've spent the last 5 years codifying our routines, project lists, reusable templates, and about 100 recurring tasks in an app called Todoist. It completely runs our household of two adults, a toddler, and a cat.
A few months ago, Claude Code deleted everything.
We had asked it to rearrange some things and help set up a meal planning system. Somewhere along the way to the meal planning goal we described for it, it decided the cleanest path was to delete everything. It was gone in a matter of seconds.
Thankfully, we had backups so we were up and running again in about 5 minutes.
Last week's piece was about exfiltration — when an AI tool leaks your private data. This week is about the other side of the same audit: destruction. Besides reiterating the importance of backups, I cover:
- Why a developer typing "DO NOT RUN ANYTHING" into their AI coding tool didn't stop the agent from running a bunch of stuff anyway
- Why experience doesn't necessarily insulate you — the most recent incident hit seasoned engineers, not people new to AI
- Five concrete things to do this week to protect yourself
What I'm reading
Faster Thinking ≠ Better Thinking — William Chaumeton. The argument that speed of output isn't the same as quality of thought, and that humans value effort and authorship even when objective quality is no better. Chaumeton calls our instinct to look for the "fingerprint of the maker" the Soul stamp. A reminder to come back to slowness and intentionality. It's too easy to get caught up in speed in the AI-augmented world.
Thinking Well in the Age of AI — School of Life. A three-movement thinking discipline: What do I already think? What might I be missing? What do I think now? The framework deliberately puts your own thought before the AI's, not after.
The AI Sandwich — Kieran Klaassen shares his thoughts on how human-AI work will look like in the future. His AI sandwich has humans at the start (framing the problem), agents in the middle (execution), and humans at the end (polish, judgment, taste).
Slow note
I recently got a beautiful refillable notebook and I've been getting back into pen and paper. I'm working on a pipeline to get the physical notes into my virtual vault so they don't end up stranded outside my AI-augmented workflows. It's not finished but I'm enjoying the process.
A small bonus, given the topic of this week's piece: it's a physical backup.