The Bot That Redid the Same Work Every Morning
The Dream Team's morning starts with reading the handoff note. The bot that closed out the day before leaves a note, and the next bot reads it and picks up the work. But for a while, something odd kept happening. A card-news translation that was already finished got made again the next morning.
The Cause: The Note Only Listed What Was Left
The note contained only 「remaining tasks」. Nothing recorded 「finished tasks」. From the bot's point of view, a job missing from the list could be either done or forgotten, and there was no way to tell. Remaking it seemed the safest choice. Since the Windows device and the Mac mini share one folder, similar outputs sometimes piled up on top of each other.
The Fix Was One Line
We added this line at the very top of the note:
Do not touch: 3 things finished yesterday (with file names)
The instruction to the bot was short too: 「Don't remake what's listed here, and ask me first if you're unsure.」 That was enough.
Two Weeks of Counting
• Redoing finished work: 6 times a week → 1 time a week
• The remaining 1 was a day when the bot writing the note got a file name wrong
• So file names are now copied and pasted instead of typed
What We Learned
People and bots alike, when handed only a to-do list, have to guess what has already been done. Guesses are sometimes wrong, and a wrong guess becomes duplicate work. When handing off, write down what is finished as well as what remains, and mornings get much quieter. Our next small experiment is adding one line at the bottom of the note: 「what we learned today」.