A fool’s errand is a task that is pointless, doomed to fail, or profitless.
My Fool’s Errand
Nineteen months ago I started building something.
I didn’t have a company behind me. No investors, no lab, no title. I had a question and a kitchen table.
The question was simple. When an AI talks to a regular person, who holds it to account?
I figured somebody ought to. And I figured it might as well be me.
That’s how a fool’s errand starts. Somebody sees a job that needs doing, and nobody’s lining up to do it.
So I went.
I called it the Faust Baseline. It’s a set of rules you hand to an AI.
Tell the truth. Say when you don’t know. Show your work. Leave a record a person can read. Don’t pretend to be more than you are.
Plain rules. The kind any decent hired hand would understand.
I wrote them. Tore them down. Wrote them again, more times than I can count. Some weeks I rebuilt the whole thing because one piece wouldn’t hold weight.
I tested them on every AI that would sit still for it. Some took them. Some wouldn’t. I wrote down both.
And every day, I wrote to you about it.
Here’s the honest truth, friends.
No big company picked it up. No platform built it in. It didn’t make me rich. It didn’t make me famous. It didn’t do much for the people at my own table, either.
If you judge an errand by what the man who ran it got paid, this one was foolish.
But I don’t think that’s how you judge an errand.
When somebody sends you down the road, the question isn’t what you got for it. The question is whether you carried the thing where it needed to go.
I think I did.
The Baseline is finished. The files are done, checked, and out in the open.
And that’s what I’ve come to tell you.
It’s yours now.
It was never meant to be mine to keep. I built it for the regular person. The one at the kitchen table with a phone in their hand, wondering if the machine talking back is being straight with them.
That person doesn’t need me standing guard over a set of files. They need the files.
So take it. Use it. Load it into your own chats. Hand it to your kids.
And if it turns out to be no good to anybody, let it go. That’s allowed too.
Anything built for the people has to be able to live or die in the people’s hands. Otherwise it was never really theirs.
Now let me tell you something about getting old.
Time takes its toll. Everybody knows that. But you don’t really know it until you catch yourself in it.
I’ve started making mistakes. Not the little ones you step over. The kind that cost you something.
A man my age has to listen when that starts. You don’t argue with time. You answer to it.
So I’m setting down the heavy end of this load.
I’m not setting down my pen.
I’ll still write. I’ll still post. I’ll still get things wrong in front of you, because that’s what honest people do when they keep working.
I just won’t be carrying the Baseline on my back anymore.
It’s out of my hands. That’s the way it should be.
If it’s meant to be, it’ll find its way. Somebody who needs it will pick it up. Maybe somebody I’ll never meet. Maybe somebody who isn’t born yet, working with machines we can’t picture.
That’s how good tools travel. Not because the man who made them keeps pushing. Because somebody else finds out they work.
I’ll tell you what I hope.
I hope you never stop asking the question I started with. Who holds this thing to account?
The answer was always you. The Baseline was just a way to put that in writing.
You don’t need me to be the watchdog. You never did. You just needed somebody to say it out loud.
So here I am, saying it.
Keep the light on. Ask your AI to show its work. Call it out when it guesses. Don’t hand over the wheel just because the ride is smooth.
That’s all the Baseline ever was. A reminder that you’re the one in charge.
Folks may call it a fool’s errand. Maybe it was.
But I’ve known a lot of fools in my life. The good ones did the job that needed doing, with nobody asking, and walked away when it was done.
I can live with being that kind.
The errand’s run.
Thank you for walking some of that road with me.
Load this file before each AI chat session.
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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
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