The lead went out to a company. It had been struck off the register two years earlier.
One undeliverable lead led me to sweep 830 directory listings against the commercial register. Sixty-eight of the companies were deleted or in liquidation.
Topic
Automation
A collection of 23 issues
I scheduled a weekly check that could never run.
An automated SEO check that needed a browser on my laptop, scheduled in the cloud. Designing a measurement window that can honestly report nothing was the real work.
We fixed checkout in production. The generator was still holding the bug.
A guest-checkout fix that never reached the build engine would have re-broken four storefronts on the next rebuild. Configuration drift, and fixes that repair themselves.
Everything returned 200. Four leads still went nowhere.
Three things broke on my own projects this week and not one of them produced an error. Silent failures are the expensive kind — here is what I changed so the systems shout.
My assistant created the same task three days running. The fix has a name: idempotency.
A tiny automation bug taught the same lesson payment systems learned years ago: the question isn't whether it runs, it's what happens when it runs again.
The real test of a system is whether the work moves when you've left the desk.
A week away, not too many meetings, and the clients' work kept moving — because the mechanical parts run on their own. On building systems that outlast your presence, and the judgement that can't be automated.
The AI said my files were empty. Every byte was still there.
My phone-side AI reported a project's notes as empty and refused to save a spreadsheet. A desktop audit found zero data loss. The failure was confidence, not storage.
Cowork reached my phone this week. I still can't tell where chat ends and Cowork begins.
Anthropic put Claude Cowork on mobile this week and OpenAI shipped ChatGPT Work days later. The Code-vs-Cowork line is clean; the Chat-vs-Cowork line still isn't. An operator's honest map of a messy, powerful moment.
I let AI reorganise my whole workspace. The dangerous moment was a find-and-replace.
Handing a sweeping reorg to an AI works when an approval gate sits in front of the irreversible steps — like a blanket find-and-replace that nearly inverted a privacy guard.
I taught my assistant to prep my week. The hard part was making it stop starting over.
A daily routine that prepares for upcoming commitments sounds simple — until it regenerates a different draft every morning. The fix came from API design: idempotency.