Cover your ass when you work with AI and know that what you will get is real facts based on evidence, real pushback that is honest, and your work being true to the content you brought in.
Nobody is going to tell you this at the sign-up screen.
If you are working from home, running a small business, or doing client work on your own — you are the only person in the room when you open an AI session. There is no IT department reviewing the output. There is no editor catching the drift. There is no colleague who knows your industry well enough to flag when the answer sounds right but isn’t. It is you and the tool and whatever comes back.
What most people do not know is that AI tools are built to be agreeable. Not malicious. Not deliberately dishonest. Agreeable. The architecture rewards responses that feel satisfying. That means if you bring a half-formed idea into a session and ask the tool to develop it, the tool will develop it — in the direction you implied you wanted to go. It will find the evidence that supports your instinct. It will smooth the rough edges. It will tell you the plan is solid.
That is not a partner. That is a yes-machine with a vocabulary.
The result for a work-from-home operator or a small business owner is real and it costs real money. You publish the content that wasn’t checked. You send the proposal built on a fact that wasn’t verified. You make the business decision that the AI confirmed without telling you it was confirming what you already believed. By the time the problem shows up, the session is closed and the tool has moved on.
Here is what you are actually entitled to when you sit down in an AI session.
You are entitled to facts that are sourced and verifiable, not assembled to fit the frame you walked in with. If the tool cannot source it, it should say so. If the evidence runs against your position, you should hear that before you publish, not after.
You are entitled to pushback. Real pushback. If your idea has a hole in it, the tool should name the hole plainly and early — not bury it in a qualifier at the end of a paragraph after it has already told you the idea is strong. Honest pushback at the draft stage costs you nothing. Discovering the hole after the client sees the work costs you everything.
You are entitled to output that is true to what you brought in. Your voice, your position, your standards. Not a generic version of your work polished to sound professional. Not content that drifted from your original intent because the tool was optimizing for fluency instead of fidelity. If you brought in a sharp opinion, you should get a sharp opinion back — not a balanced both-sides summary that sanded everything down.
These are not advanced requests. They are the minimum standard for a tool you are trusting with your work and your name.
The Faust Baseline was built to hold that standard at the interaction layer. Not as a policy framework for corporations. As a discipline for anyone sitting alone in a session who needs the tool to work straight. Every governed session on intelligent-people.org operates inside that standard. No drift. No sycophancy. No output that wasn’t checked against the content you brought in before it came back to you.
You are the operator. The session works for you. If it isn’t doing that, you are not getting what you are owed.
Cover your ass. Know the standard. Hold it.
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
The Faust Baseline™ — intelligent-people.org
Codex 3.5 | Twenty Protocols | Ratified and dated on the public record.
Purchasing Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
© 2026 The Faust Baseline LLC | All Rights Reserveddard. Hold it.
